








' 



^ v* x 















0' 


















■ 



s ' 






















l'* *%. ^ 




V * 






K • 







^ 






r %■- 



'. *<<■ 














"o 






»/. s* 


*« 









,v '*k 



cP 







: ^ ■• 









3 











#' % 







& %. 












*' c ^ 












V 
















. 



ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 



Books bp #♦ P* £mtmtt« 



THE RATIONALE OF MESMERISM. 

i6mo, $1.25. 

ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

New American Edition. With Introduction pre- 
pared expressly for it by the Author. i6mo, 
$1.25. 

THE OCCULT WORLD. 

New American from the Fourth English Edi- 
tion. With an Introduction written for the 
American Edition by the Author, and Appen- 
dix. i6mo ? $1.25. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 
Boston and New York. 



ESOTERIC BUDDHISM 



BY 



A. P. SINNETT 

PRESIDENT OF THE SIMLA ECLECTIC THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 
AUTHOR OF "THE OCCULT WORLD " 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

i8Q3 



b* 






X 



6 



Copyright, 1884, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



All rights reserved. 

To Replace lost copy 

NOV 2 0.1946 




Hie Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., IT. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE. 



The fifth English edition of Esoteric Bud- 
dhism consists of the text of the fourth Amer- 
ican edition, together with the larger part of the 
preface specially furnished by Mr. Sinnett for 
the American edition. He took the opportunity 
afforded by a new edition, also, to append to 
some of the chapters annotations upon points 
calling for explication. These annotations are 
now added to the sixth American edition as an 
appendix. The present edition therefore cor- 
responds with the latest English edition, and 
has besides matter in the author's preface not 
incorporated in any English edition. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN 
EDITION. 



This book was written in the early part of 
1883, and now that I am venturing to recom- 
mend it to public notice afresh in the latter 
part of 1884, after three English editions have 
passed through the press, I find myself in pos- 
session of much additional information bearing 
on many of the problems dealt with. But I 
am glad to be able to say that such later teach- 
ing as I have yet received only reveals incom- 
pleteness in my original conceptions of the eso- 
teric doctrine, — no material error so far. In- 
deed, I am happy enough to have received, from 
the great adept himself from whom I obtained 
my instruction in the first instance, the assur- 
ance that the book as it now stands is a sound 
and trustworthy statement of the scheme of 
Nature as understood by the initiates of occult 
science, which may have to be a good deal de- 
veloped in future, if the interest it excites is 
keen enough to constitute an efficient demand 



6 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

for further teaching of this kind on the part of 
the world at large, but will never have to be 
remodeled or apologized for. 

Further than this, the reception of the book 
in India has shown that the doctrines thus 
for the first time set forth in a coherent and 
straightforward way are recognized, when thus 
stated, by various schools of Oriental philoso- 
phy as consonant with their fundamental views. 
A Brahman Hindoo, writing in the Indian 
magazine, "The Theosophist," for June, 1884, 
criticises the present volume as departing un- 
necessarily from accepted Sanskrit nomencla- 
ture ; but his objection merely is that I have 
given unfamiliar names in some cases to ideas 
which are already expressed in Hindoo sacred 
writings, and that I have done too much honor 
to the religious system commonly known as 
Buddhism, by representing that as more closely 
allied with the esoteric doctrine than any other. 
" The popular wisdom of the majority of the 
Hindoos to this day," says my Brahman critic, 
" is more or less tinged with the esoteric doc- 
trines taught in Mr. Sinnett's book, misnamed 
'Esoteric Buddhism,' while there is not a sin- 
gle hamlet or village in the whole of India in 
which people are not more or less acquainted 
with the sublime tenets of the Vedanta philoso- 
phy. . . . The effects of Karma in the next 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 7 

birth, the enjoyment of its fruits, good or evil, in 
a subjective or spiritual state of existence prior 
to the re-incarnation of the spiritual monad in 
this or any other world, the loitering of the 
unsatisfied souls or human shells in the earth 
(Kamaloca), the pralayic and manwantaric pe- 
riods, . . . are not only intelligible but are even 
familiar to a great many Hindoos, under names 
different from those made use of by the author 
of ' Esoteric Buddhism.' " So much the better 
from the point of view of Western readers, to 
whom it is a matter of indifference whether the 
exoteric Hindoo or Buddhist religion is nearest 
to absolutely true spiritual science, which should 
certainly bear no name that appears to wed it 
to any one faith in the external world more 
than to another. All that we in the West can 
be anxious for is to arrive at a clear understand- 
ing as to the essential principles of that science, 
and if we find the principles defined in this 
book claimed by the cultured representatives of 
more than one great Oriental creed as equally 
the underlying truths of their different systems, 
we shall be all the better inclined to believe the 
present exposition of doctrine worth our atten- 
tion. 

In regard to the complaint itself, that the 
teachings here reduced to an intelligible shape 
are incorrectly described by the name this book 



8 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

bears, I cannot do better than quote the note 
by which the editor of " The Theosophist " re- 
plies to his Brahman contributor. He says: 
" We print the above letter, as it expresses, in 
courteous language and in an able manner, the 
views of a large number of our Hindoo broth- 
ers. At the same time it must be stated that 
the name of ' Esoteric Buddhism ' was given to 
Mr. Sinnett's latest publication, not because 
the doctrine propounded therein is meant to be 
specially identified with any particular form of 
faith, but because Buddhism means the doc- 
trine of the Buddhas, the Wise, i. e. the Wis- 
dom Religion." For my own part I need only 
add that I fully accept and adopt that explana- 
tion of the matter. It would, indeed, be a mis- 
conception of the design which this book is in- 
tended to subserve, to suppose it concerned with 
the recommendation, to a dilettante modern 
taste, of old world fashions in religious thought. 
The external forms and fancies of religion in 
one age may be a little purer, in another age a 
little more corrupt, but they inevitably adapt 
themselves to their period, and it would be 
extravagant to imagine them interchangeable. 
The present statement is not put forward in 
the hope of making Buddhists from among the 
adherents of any other system, but with the 
view of conveying to thoughtful readers, as well 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 9 

in the East as in the West, a series of leading 
ideas, relating to the actual verities of Nature, 
and the real facts of Man's progress through 
evolution, which have been communicated to the 
writer in their present shape by Eastern phi- 
losophers, and thus fall most readily into an 
Oriental mould. But the value of these teach- 
ings will perhaps be most fully realized when 
we clearly perceive that they are scientific in 
their character, rather than polemical. Spirit- 
ual truths, if they are truths, may evidently be 
dealt with in a no less scientific spirit than 
chemical reactions. And no religious feeling, 
of whatever color it may be, need be disturbed 
by the importation into the general stock of 
knowledge of new discoveries about the consti- 
tution and nature of Man on the plane of his 
higher activities. True religion will eventually 
find a way to assimilate such fresh knowledge 
in the same way that it finally acquiesces in a 
gradual enlargement of knowledge on the phys- 
ical plane. This, in the first instance, may 
sometimes disconcert notions associated with 
religious belief, — as geological science at first 
embarrassed biblical chronology. But in time 
men came to see that the essence of the biblical 
statement does not reside in the literal sense of 
cosmological passages, and religious conceptions 
grew all the purer for the relief thus afforded 



10 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

In just the same way, when positive scientific 
knowledge begins to embrace a comprehension 
of laws relating to the spiritual development 
of Man, some misconceptions of Nature long 
blended with religion may have to give way, 
but still it will be found that the central ideas 
of true religion have been cleared up and bright- 
ened all the better for the process. Especially, 
as such processes continue, will the internal dis- 
sensions of the religious world be inevitably 
subdued. The warfare of sects can only be due 
to a failure on the part of rival sectarians to 
grasp fundamental facts. Could a time come 
when the basic ideas on which religion rests 
should be comprehended with the same cer- 
tainty with which we comprehend some pri- 
mary physical laws, and disagreement about 
them be recognized by all educated people as 
ridiculous, then there would not be room for 
very acrimonious divergences of religious senti- 
ment. Externals of religious thought would 
still differ in different climates and among dif- 
ferent races, — as dress and dietaries differ, ■ — 
but such differences would not give rise to in- 
tellectual antagonism. 

Basic facts of the kind that must, when they 
come to be widely recognized as such, have a 
tendency in this way to blend together super- 
ficially divergent views, not to provoke a trial 



. 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 11 

of strength between them, are developed, it 
appears to me, in the exposition of spiritual 
science we have now obtained from our Eastern 
friends. It is quite unnecessary for religious 
thinkers to turn aside from them under the 
impression that they are arguments in favor of 
some Eastern, in preference to the more gen- 
eral Western, creed. If medical science were to 
discover a new fact about Man's body, were to 
unveil some hitherto concealed principle on 
which the growth of skin and flesh and bone 
is carried on, that discovery would not be re- 
garded as trenching at all on the domain of 
religion. Would the domain of religion be in- 
vaded by a discovery, for example, that should 
go one step behind the action of the nerves, 
and disclose a finer set of activities manipulat- 
ing these as they manipulate the muscles? At 
all events, even if such a discovery might begin 
to reconcile science and religion, no man who 
allows any of his higher faculties to enter into 
his religious thinking would put aside a posi- 
tive fact of Nature, clearly shown to be such, 
as hostile to religion. Being a fact, it is inevi- 
table that it should fit in with all other facts, 
and with religious truth among the number. 
So with the great mass of information in refer- 
ence to the evolution of Man embodied in the 
present statement. Our best plan evidently is, 



12 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

to ask, before we look into the report I bring 
forward, not whether it will square in all re- 
spects with preconceived views, but whether it 
really does introduce us to a series of natural 
facts connected with the growth and develop- 
ment of Man's higher faculties. If it does this, 
we may wisely examine the facts first in the 
scientific spirit, and leave them to exercise 
whatever effect on collateral beliefs may be 
reasonable and legitimate, later on. 

Ramifying, as the explanation proceeds, into 
a great many side paths, it will be seen by 
the readers of this book that the central idea 
now presented to us completes and spiritualizes 
the great conception of physical anthropology, 
which accounts for the evolution of Man's body 
by successive and very gradual improvements 
of animal forms from generation to generation. 
That is a very barren and miserable theory, re- 
garded as an all-embracing account of creation ; 
but, properly understood, it paves the way for 
a comprehension of the higher concurrent pro- 
cess, which is all the while evolving the soul of 
Man in the higher spiritual realms of existence. 
The circumstances under which this is done 
reconcile the evolutionary method with the in- 
stinctive craving of every self-conscious entity 
for perpetuity of individual life. The dis- 
jointed series of improving forms on this earth 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 13 

have no individuality, and the life of each in 
turn is a separate transaction which finds no 
compensation for suffering involved, no justice, 
no fruit of its efforts, in the life of its successor. 
It is possible to argue on the assumption of a 
new independent creation of a human soul, 
every time a new human form is produced by 
physiological growth, that in the after spiritual 
state of such soul justice may be awarded ; but 
then this conception is itself at variance with 
the fundamental idea of evolution, which traces, 
or believes that it traces, the origin of each soul 
to the working of highly developed matter in 
each case. Nor is it less at variance with the 
analogies of Nature, as these come under our 
observation ; but without going into that, it is 
enough for the moment to perceive that the 
theory of spiritual evolution, as set forth in the 
teaching of esoteric science, is, at any rate, in 
harmony with these analogies, while at the 
same time it satisfactorily meets the require- 
ments of justice and of the instinctive demand 
for continuity of individual life. 

This theory recognizes the evolution of the 
soul as a process that is quite continuous in 
itself, though carried out partly through the 
intermediation of a great series of dissociated 
forms. Putting aside, for the moment, the 
profound metaphysics of the theory which trace 



14 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

the principle of life from the original first 
cause of the Cosmos, we find the soul as an 
entity emerging from the animal kingdom and 
passing into the earliest human forms, without 
being at that time ripe for the higher intellec- 
tual life with which the present state of hu- 
manity renders us familiar. But through suc- 
cessive incarnations in forms whose physical 
improvement, under the Darwinian law of 
evolution, is constantly fitting them to be its 
habitations at each return to objective life, it 
gradually gathers that enormous range of ex- 
perience which is summed up in its higher de- 
velopment. In the intervals between its physi- 
cal incarnations, it prolongs and works out, and 
finally exhausts or transmutes into so much ab- 
stract development, the personal experiences of 
each life. This is the clue to that apparent 
difficulty which besets the cruder form of the 
theory of re-incarnation, which independent 
speculation has sometimes thrown out. Each 
man is unconscious of having led previous lives, 
therefore he contends that subsequent lives can 
afford him no compensations for this one. He 
overlooks the enormous importance of the in- 
tervening spiritual condition, in which he by 
no means forgets the personal adventures and 
emotions he has just passed through, and in 
which he distills them into so much cosmic 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 15 

progress. In the following pages the elucida- 
tion of this profoundly interesting mystery is 
attempted, ancf it will be seen that the view of 
events now afforded us is not only a solution 
of the problems of life and death, but of many 
very perplexing experiences on the border land 
between those conditions, — or rather between 
physical and spiritual life, — which have en- 
gaged attention and speculation so widely of 
recent years in most civilized countries. 

It was time, in fact, that the esoteric doc- 
trine should be offered to modern thinkers 
to assist them in grappling with the enigmas 
-which the spasmodic operation of very exalted 
spiritual faculties in some cases — the manifes- 
tation of some extra-physical laws and forces 
of Nature in others — have been latterly ac- 
cumulating on our hands in great abundance. 
Rather, I imagine, because the conjectures put 
forward to account for them were unacceptable 
to the cultivated world at large, than because 
the occurrence of extra-physical manifestations 
of late years has been disbelieved altogether, 
have most people been unwilling to pay close 
attention to such occurrences. Nor is it neces- 
sary that they should do so now, in order to 
reach an intellectual standpoint from which the 
whole range of possibilities in regard to com- 
munications that may be established between 



16 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

the seen and the unseen worlds may be broadly 
comprehended. The higher culture of the East 
has been concerned with the investigation, in 
its own congenial retirement, of that side of Na- 
ture, while we in the West have been pushing 
forward our physical civilization to its present 
great height. Different races in the world ad- 
vance in this way along different lines of prog- 
ress ; or, rather, — to state the idea more sci- 
entifically in the light of the occult doctrine, 
— all races have their cyclic progress to accom- 
plish, at one period of whkh they are concerned 
with physical and at another with spiritual cul- 
ture. We of the white race in Europe and 
America — embodying within the last few cen- 
turies one phase of the progress of our sub- 
section of humanity — have been concerned al- 
most entirely, during the historic period, with 
the development of our material civilization. 
Our religions, meanwhile, have had to do rather 
with the maintenance of spiritual aspirations in 
a potential state, than with the keen investiga- 
tion of the facts of Nature in the spiritual re- 
gion. We have keenly investigated these facts 
on the physical plane, for that was the proper 
function of our age ; but all earnestness of ef- 
fort on the part of Oriental races, in the mean- 
while, has been turned in another direction. 
There, physical civilization has been stagnant, 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 17 

material progress quite unimportant, but spirit' 
ual aspirations have been not merely kept up 
as an underlying sentiment in people's minds, 
— they have operated to produce the greatest 
manifestations of activity with which the race 
has been concerned. I do not mean that the 
Indian or any other Asiatic race has been as 
active in writing books and publishing discov- 
eries in spiritual science as we in the West 
have been with the literature and research of 
physics. That kind of activity is itself a mani- 
festation of material civilization. But the Asi- 
atic races have fermented with capacities for 
great spiritual development, and the conse- 
quence has been that many Eastern people 
have devoted their lives to spiritual study and 
research, always, of course, pursuing the meth- 
ods of research and the modes of life appro- 
priate to a cycle of spiritual progress, — meth- 
ods which lead the student of — and still more 
the adept in — such science into seclusion and 
secrecy. 

Probably it may be due in some way to an 
opposite fermentation of causes in the East and 
the West now that a certain interchange of 
methods begins to be possible. I do not mean 
that the West is turning away yet from ma- 
terial civilization, nor the East slackening its 
devotion to spirituality, but we here are cer- 



18 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION, 

thinly readier now than we were a generation 
or two ago to recognize the possibility of ac- 
quiring real knowledge of spiritual science, and 
are more generally impressed with the neces- 
sity of such acquisitions. The East on the other 
hand has partially relaxed its hitherto inviola- 
ble reserve. The important movement of which 
this little book is one outcome constitutes a 
double illustration of the new tendency at last 
discernible. It is discernible in several differ- 
ent ways to acute observers who once possess 
themselves of the key to what is going on. But 
it is only of that particular effort in which my 
own willing services have been engaged that I 
need now speak. A book more or less, in this 
ocean of books which is constantly welling forth 
from active Western civilization, may seem a 
very small matter ; but to the highly conserva- 
tive devotees of occult science in the East, a 
book which sets forth in plain language, which 
all who run may read, the hitherto secret in- 
terpretations of Nature's spiritual design that 
have hitherto been communicated only in the 
deadliest secrecy to students of long absorption 
in the pursuit of such teaching, constitutes a 
violation of the old occult usage which is quite 
bewildering and appalling. As my Brahman 
critic above referred to points out, now that 
the esoteric doctrine is once for all plainly 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 19 

stated, it is seen to be embodied, a bit here 
and a bit there, in the various sacred writings 
of India. But at the same time it was nowhere 
stated in such terms as to be comprehensible 
without prolonged and special study. And for 
the most part the doctrine, in so far as it was 
stated, was wrapped in allegory that Western 
readers have rarely had the patience to unravel. 
To all intents and purposes, though the knowl- 
edge here set forth is no new discovery for those 
by whom it is now revealed, it is a new revela- 
tion for the whole world, — Eastern and West- 
ern alike, — in its present explicit distinctness, 
and has only been prepared for in the West, 
but I trust prepared for sufficiently, by that 
widespread seething interest in spiritual things 
which has been working among us for some 
years past. 

This interest has been stimulated in various 
ways. The casual occurrence of phenomena 
linking our physical perceptions with the un- 
seen world has kindled an ardent enthusiasm 
for inquiry along the path of investigation thus 
pointed out, but the laws of Nature affecting 
the vast realm of spiritual existence are far too 
complicated to be discovered from an observa- 
tion of the phenomena of the relatively nar- 
row subdivision of that realm brought within 
our cognizance almost exclusively by casual and 



20 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

irregular occurrences of the kind referred to. 
It is only with the help of esoteric science — 
the accumulated experience of a great school of 
inquirers, devoting faculties of the highest kind, 
for a long series of ages, to the exploration 
of spiritual mysteries — that a sufficiently wide 
view of Nature can be obtained to embrace the 
apparently disorderly phenomena of the astral 
world, — the first beyond the physical frontier, 
— in all-sufficing generalizations that cover the 
whole scheme of spiritual evolution. These far- 
reaching and magnificent conceptions of Nature 
should not only recommend themselves, when 
properly understood, to minds that have shrunk 
from crude conclusions based on the imperfect 
data of modern spiritual observation in the 
West, but should also be recognized by modern 
spiritualists themselves as calculated to purify 
and expand their own doctrines, and guard 
them from liability to underrate the grandeur 
of the region into which they have partly 
penetrated, by relying, for its interpretation, 
too confidently on experiences gathered at its 
threshold. For the theosophic teaching, which 
has been too hastily resented by some spiritual- 
ists who have conceived it hostile to their own 
acquired knowledge, will be discovered, on a 
closer examination, to include these experi- 
ences, and only to disconcert some of the con- 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 21 

elusions derived from them. It must be re- 
membered that my statements concerning the 
phenomena of Kama loca, — the astral world, 
from which most of the phenomena of spirit- 
ualism emanate, — have been the fruit of my 
own questions and inquiries rather than a por- 
tion of a carefully adjusted series of lessons in 
occult science, dictated by professors applying 
themselves to the art of teaching. That, in- 
deed, has been the way in which the whole 
body of exposition which this book contains 
has been worked out, and it naturally follows 
that some parts of it are less complete than 
others, and that none can be much better than 
general outlines. In esoteric science, as in mi- 
croscopy, the application of higher and higher 
powers will always continue to reveal a grow- 
ing wealth of detail ; and the sketch of an or- 
ganism that appeared satisfactory enough when 
its general proportions were first discerned, is 
betrayed to be almost worse than insufficient 
when a number of previously unsuspected minu- 
tiae are brought to notice. In this way, while 
no mistake has been made as regards any state- 
ment actually put forward in the following 
pages on the subject of human evolution after 
death, there will be more, I apprehend, to add 
to that part of the explanation in later expan- 
sions of it, if these become practicable, than to 



22 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

any other. The points which, meanwhile, I 
will ask spiritualist readers to bear in mind 
are especially these : 

1st. It is already indicated that the dissolu- 
tion of the human principles after death, though 
one cannot help speaking of the process as one 
of dispersion, is not actually a mechanical sepa- 
ration of parts, nor even a process analogous to 
the chemical dissolution of a compound body 
into elements on the same plane of matter. 
The discussion of the process as if it were a 
mechanical separation was represented from 
the first as " a rough way of dealing with the 
matter," and was adopted for the sake of em- 
phasizing the transition of consciousness from 
one principle to another which goes on in the 
astral world after death. This transition of 
consciousness is, in fact, the struggle between 
the higher and lower duad. 

2d. The struggle just referred to may be 
regarded as an oscillation of consciousness be- 
tween the two duads ; and when the return of 
consciousness to the lower principles, during 
this struggle, is stimulated and encouraged by 
converse with still living entities on the earth 
plane, with the help of medium ship, the proper 
spiritual growth of the entity in Kama loca is, 
to that extent, — perhaps to a very consider- 
able extent, — retarded. It is this considers 



INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 23 

tion which may, in a greater degree than any 
other, account for the disapproval with which 
the adepts of occult science regard the active 
practice of spiritualistic intercourse with de- 
parted human beings. Such intercourse, though 
dictated from this side by the purest affection, 
may seriously retard and embarrass the spirit- 
ual development of those who have gone in 
advance of us. 

3d. It is recognized in the following pages 
-that intercourse between living human beings 
gifted with a very elevated sort of mecliumship, 
or spiritual clairvoyance, and departed friends 
with whom they have been closely united in 
sympathy during life, is possible on the higher 
spiritual plane, after such persons have passed 
through the struggle of Kama loca and have 
been completely spiritualized. That intercourse 
may be of a more subtle kind than can readily 
be realized by reference to examples of inter- 
course on the earth plane, but may evidently 
be none the less exhilarating to the higher per- 
ceptions. 

By dwelling on the points of contact between 
the theosophic teachings and the experience of 
the higher spiritualism, I think it will be found 
that the alleged incompatibility of theosophy 
and spiritualism is much less complete than is 
supposed. It is impossible, I venture to assert, 






24 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN EDITION. 

that there can be any true psychic experience 
which the doctrines of theosophy — or, to speak 
more accurately, of that esoteric science of which 
theosophy is the study — will fail to interpret 
and explain. And if this partial exposition of 
esoteric science may leave a good deal not yet 
explained in the vast region of mystery which 
separates death and re-birth, surely the revela- 
tions which are made here go far enough to es- 
tablish a good claim on our respectful attention 
for the present, so that some embarrassments 
they may still leave to trouble our understand- 
ing may fairly be passed to a suspense account, 
while we await a further illumination, to be, 
perhaps, obtainable hereafter. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



The teachings embodied in the present vol- 
ume let in a flood of light on questions con- 
nected with Buddhist doctrine which have 
deeply perplexed previous writers on that re- 
ligion, and offer the world for the first time a 
practical clue to the meaning of almost all 
ancient religious symbolism. More than this, 
the esoteric doctrine, when properly under- 
stood, will be found to advance an overpower- 
ing claim on the attention of earnest thinkers. 
Its tenets are not presented to us as the in- 
vention of any founder or prophet ; its testi- 
mony is based on no written scriptures; its 
views of Nature have been evolved by the re- 
searches of an immense succession of investiga- 
tors, qualified for their task by the possession 
of spiritual faculties and perceptions of a higher 
order than those belonging to ordinary human- 
ity. In the course of ages, the block of knowl- 
edge thus accumulated, concerning the origin 
of the world and of man, and the ultimate des- 



26 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

tinies of our race, — concerning also the na- 
ture of other worlds and states of existence dif- 
fering from those of our present life, — checked 
and examined at every point, verified in all 
directions, and constantly under examination 
throughout, has come to be looked on by its 
custodians as constituting the absolute truth 
concerning spiritual things, the actual state of 
the facts regarding vast regions of vital activ- 
ity lying beyond this earthly existence. 

European philosophy, whether concerned 
with religion or pure metaphysics, has so long 
been used to a sense of insecurity in specula- 
tions outrunning the limits of physical experi- 
ment, that absolute truth about spiritual things 
is hardly recognized any longer by prudent 
thinkers as a reasonable object of pursuit ; but 
different habits of thought have been acquired 
in Asia. The secret doctrine which, to a con- 
siderable extent, I am now enabled to expound, 
is regarded not only by all its adherents, but 
by vast numbers who have never expected to 
know more of it than that such a doctrine ex- 
ists, as a mine of entirely trustworthy knowl- 
edge, from which all religions and philosophies 
have derived whatever they possess of truth, 
and with which every religion must coincide if 
it claims to be a mode of expression for truth. 

This is a bold claim indeed, but I venture to 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 27 

announce the following exposition as one of 
immense importance to the world, because I 
believe that claim can be substantiated. 

I do not say that within the compass of 
this volume the authenticity of the esoteric 
doctrine can be proved. Such proof cannot 
be given by any process of argument ; only 
through the development in each inquirer for 
himself of the faculties required for the direct 
observation of Nature along the lines indicated. 
But his primd facie conclusion may be deter- 
mined by the extent to which the views of 
Nature about to be unfolded may recommend 
themselves to his mind, and by the reasons 
which exist for trusting the powers of observa- 
tion of those by whom they are communicated. 

Will it be supposed that the very magnitude 
of the claim now made on behalf of the eso- 
teric doctrine, lifts the present statement out 
of the region of inquiry to which its title re- 
fers, — inquiry as to the real inner meaning of 
the definite and specific religion called Bud- 
dhism ? The fact is, however, that esoteric 
Buddhism, though by no means divorced from 
the associations of exoteric Buddhism, must not 
be conceived to constitute a mere imperium in 
imperio, — a central school of culture in the 
vortex of the Buddhist world. In proportion 
as Buddhism retreats into the inner penetralia 



28 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

of its faith, these are found to merge into the 
inner penetralia of other faiths. The cosmic 
conceptions, and the knowledge of Nature on 
which Buddhism not merely rests, but which 
constitute esoteric Buddhism, equally consti- 
tute esoteric Brahmanism. And the esoteric 
doctrine is thus regarded by those of all creeds 
who are " enlightened " (in the Buddhist sense) 
as the absolute truth concerning Nature, Man, 
the origin of the Universe, and the destinies 
toward which its inhabitants are tending. At 
the same time, exoteric Buddhism has remained 
in closer union with the esoteric doctrine than 
any other popular religion. An exposition of 
the inner knowledge addressed to English read- 
ers in the present day, will thus associate itself 
irresistibly with familiar outlines of Buddhist 
teaching. It will certainly impart to these a 
living meaning they generally seem to be with- 
out, but all the more on this account may the 
esoteric doctrine be most conveniently studied 
in its Buddhist aspect ; one, moreover, which 
has been so strongly impressed upon it since 
the time of Gautama Buddha, that though the 
essence of the doctrine dates back to a far more 
remote antiquity, the Buddhist coloring has 
now permeated its whole substance. That 
which I am about to put before the reader is 
esoteric Buddhism, and for European students 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 29 

approaching it for the first time, any other des- 
ignation would be a misnomer. 

The statement I have to make must be con- 
sidered in its entirety before the reader will be 
able to comprehend why initiates in the eso- 
teric doctrine regard the concession involved in 
the present disclosure of the general outlines 
of this doctrine as one of startling magnitude. 
One explanation of this feeling, however, may 
be readily seen to spring from the extreme 
sacredness that has always been attached by 
their ancient guardians to the inner vital truths 
of Nature. Hitherto this sacredness has al- 
ways prescribed their absolute concealment 
from the profane herd. And so far as that 
policy of concealment — the tradition of count- 
less ages — is now being given up, the new de- 
parture which the appearance of this volume 
signalizes will be contemplated with surprise 
and regret by a great many initiated disciples. 
The surrender to criticism, which may some- 
times perhaps be clumsy and irreverent, of doc- 
trines which have hitherto been regarded by 
such persons as too majestic in their import to 
be talked of at all except under circumstances 
of befitting solemnity, will seem to them a ter« 
rible profanation of the great mysteries. From 
the European point of view it would be un- 
reasonable to expect that such a book as this 



30 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

can be exempt from the usual rough-and-tumble 
treatment of new ideas ; and special convictions 
or commonplace bigotry may sometimes ren- 
der such treatment in the present case pecul- 
iarly inimical. But all that, though a matter 
of course to European exponents of the doc- 
trine like myself, will seem very grievous and 
disgusting to its earlier and more regular repre- 
sentatives. They will appeal sadly to the wis- 
dom of the time-honored rule which, in the old 
symbolical way, forbade the initiates from cast- 
ing pearls before swine. 

Happily, as I think, the rule has not been 
allowed to operate any longer to the prejudice, 
of those who, while still far from being initi- 
ated, in the occult sense of the term, will prob- 
ably have become, by sheer force of modern 
culture, qualified to appreciate the concession. 

Part of the information contained in the fol- 
lowing pages has been thrown out in a frag- 
mentary form during the last eighteen months 
in " The Theosophist," a monthly magazine, 
published hitherto at Bombay, but now at 
Madras, by the leaders of the Theosophical So- 
ciety. As almost all the articles referred to 
have been my own writing, I have not hesi- 
tated to weld parts of them, when this course 
has been convenient, into the present volume. 
A certain advantage is gained by thus showing 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 31 

how the separate pieces of the mosaic, as first 
presented to public notice, drop naturally into 
their places in the (comparatively) finished 
pavement. 

The doctrine or system now disclosed in its 
broad outlines has been so jealously guarded 
hitherto, that no mere literary researches, though 
they might have currycombed all India, could 
have brought to light any morsel of the infor- 
mation thus revealed. It is given out to the 
world at last by the free grace of those in whose 
keeping it has hitherto lain. Nothing could ever 
have extorted from them its very first letter. It 
is only after a perusal of the present explanations 
that their position generally, as regards their 
present disclosures or their previous reticence, 
can be criticised or even comprehended. The 
views of Nature now put forward are altogether 
unfamiliar to European thinkers ; the policy of 
the graduates in esoteric knowledge, which has 
grown out of their long intimacy with these 
views, must be considered in connection with 
the peculiar bearings of the doctrine itself. 

As for the circumstances under which these 
revelations were first foreshadowed in " The 
Theosophist," and are now rounded off and ex- 
panded as my readers will perceive, it is enough 
for the moment to say, that the Theosophical 
Society, through my connection with which the 



32 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

materials dealt with in this volume have come 
into my hands, owes its establishment to certain 
persons who are among the custodians of eso- 
teric science. The information poured out at 
last for the benefit of all who are ripe to receive 
it has been destined for communication to the 
world through the Theosophical Society since 
the foundation of that body, and later circum- 
stances only have indicated myself as the agent 
through whom the communication could be con- 
veniently made. 

Let me add, that I do not regard myself as 
the sole exponent for the outer world, at this 
crisis, of esoteric truth. These teachings are the 
final outcome, as regards philosophical knowl- 
edge, of the relations with the outer world 
which have been established by the custodians 
of esoteric truth, through me. And it is only 
regarding the acts and intentions of those eso- 
teric teachers who have chosen to work through 
me, that I can have any certain knowledge. 
But, in different ways, some other writers are 
engaged in expounding for the benefit of the 
world — and, as I believe, in accordance with a 
great plan, of which this volume is a part — 
the same truths, in different aspects, that I am 
commissioned to unfold. A remarkable book, 
published within the hist year or two, "The 
Perfect Way," may be specially mentioned, as 



PREFACE TO TEE FIRST EDITION. 33 

showing bow more roads than one may lead 
to a mountain-top. The inner inspirations of 
" The Perfect Way" appear to me identical with 
the philosophy that I have learned. The sym- 
bols in which those inspirations are clothed, in 
my opinion, I am bound to add, are liable to 
mislead the student ; but this is a natural con- 
sequence of the circumstances under which 
the inner inspiration has been received. Far 
more important and interesting to me than the 
discrepancies between the teachings of " The 
Perfect Way " and my own, are the identities 
that may be traced between the clear scientific 
explanations now conveyed to me on the plane 
of the physical intellect, and the ideas which 
manifestly underlie those communicated on an 
altogether different system to the authors of 
the book I mention. These identities are a 
great deal too close to be the result either of 
coincidence or parallel speculation. 

Probably the great activity at present of 
mere ordinary literary speculation on problems 
lying beyond the range of physical knowledge, 
may also be in some way provoked by that 
policy, on the part of the great custodians of 
esoteric truth, of which my own book is cer- 
tainly one manifestation, and the volume I 
have just mentioned, probably another. I find, 
for example, in M. Adolphe d'Assier's recently 



84 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

published " Essai sur PHurnanite* Posthume," 
some conjectures respecting the destination of 
the higher human principles after death, which 
are infused with quite a startling flavor of 
true occult knowledge. Again, the ardor now 
shown in " Psychical Research," by the very 
distinguished, highly gifted, and cultivated men 
who lead the society in London devoted to that 
object, is, to my inner convictions, — knowing, 
as I do, something of the way the spiritual 
aspirations of the world are silently influenced 
by those whose work lies in that department of 
Nature, — the obvious fruit of efforts parallel to 
those with which I am more immediately con- 
cerned. 

It only remains for me to disclaim, on behalf 
of the treatise which ensues, any pretension to 
high finish as regards the language in which it 
is cast. Longer familiarity with the vast and 
complicated scheme of cosmogony disclosed, 
will no doubt suggest improvements in the 
phraseology employed to expound it. Two 
years ago, neither I nor any other European 
living knew the alphabet of the science here 
for the first time put into a scientific shape, — 
or subject, at all events, to an attempt in that 
direction, — the science of spiritual causes and 
their effects, of super-physical consciousness, 
of cosmical evolution. Though, as I have ex« 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 35 

plained above, ideas had begun to offer them- 
selves to the world in more or less embarrassing 
disguise of mystic symbology, no attempt had 
ever been made by any esoteric teacher, two 
years back, to put the doctrine forward in its 
plain abstract purity. As my own instruction 
progressed on those lines, I have had to coin 
phrases and suggest English words as equiv- 
alents for the ideas which were presented to 
my mind. I am by no means convinced that 
in all cases I have coined the best possible 
phrases and hit on the most neatly expressive 
words. For example, at the threshold of the 
subject we come upon the necessity of giving 
some name to the various elements or attributes 
of which the complete human creature is made 
up. " Element " would be an impossible word 
to use, on account of the confusion that would 
arise from its use in other significations ; and 
the least objectionable, on the whole, seemed to 
me " principle," though to an ear trained in the 
niceties of metaphysical expression this word 
will have a very unsatisfactory sound in some 
of its present applications. Quite possibly, 
therefore, in progress of time the Western 
nomenclature of the esoteric doctrine may be 
greatly developed in advance of that I have 
provisionally constructed. The Oriental no- 
menclature is far more elaborate, but metaphys- 



36 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

ical Sanskrit seems to be painfully embarrassing 
to a translator, — the fault, my India friends 
assure me, not of Sanskrit, but of the language 
in which they are now required to express the 
Sanskrit idea. Eventually we may find that, 
with the help of a little borrowing from familiar 
Greek quarries, English may prove more re- 
ceptive of the new doctrine — or, rather, of the 
primeval doctrine as newly disclosed — than 
has yet been supposed possible in the East. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 

PAGE 

Nature of the Present Exposition. — Seclusion of 
Eastern Knowledge. — The Arhats and their At- 
tributes. — The Mahatmas. — Occultists generally. 

— Isolated Mystics. — Inferior Yogis. — Occult 
Training. — The Great Purpose. — Its Incidental 
Consequences. — Present Concessions .... 41 

CHAPTER II. 

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 

Esoteric Cosmogony. — Where to Begin. — Working 
back from Man to Universe. — Analysis of Man. 

— The Seven Principles 60 

CHAPTER m. 

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 

Esoteric Views of Evolution. — The Chain of Globes. 

— Progress of Man round them. — The Spiral 
Advance. — Original Evolution of the Globes. — 
The Lower Kingdoms 75 



38 CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE WORLD PERIODS. 

PAGE 

Uniformity of Nature. — Rounds and Races. — The 
Septenary Law. — Objective and Subjective Lives. 

— Total Incarnations. — Former Races on Earth. 

— Periodic Cataclysms. — Atlantis. — Lemuria. , 

— The Cyclic Law 94 

CHAPTER V. 

DEVACHAN. 

Spiritual Destinies of the Ego. — Karma. — Divis- 
ion of the Principles at Death. — Progress of the 
Higher Duad. — Existence in Devachan. — Sub- 
jective Progress. — Avitchi. — Earthly Connection 
with Devachan. — Devachanic Periods . . . .121 



CHAPTER VI. 

KAMA LOCA. 

The Astral Shell. — Its Habitat. — Its Nature. — 
Surviving Impulses. — Elementals. — Mediums 
and Shells. — Accidents and Suicides. — Lost Per- 
sonalities 150 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 

Progress of the Main Wave. — Obscurations. — Twi- 
light and Dawn of Evolution. — Our Neighboring 



CONTENTS. 39 

PAGE 

Planets.— Gradations of Spirituality.— Prematurely 
Developed Egos. — Intervals of Re-Incarnation . 171 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 

The Choice of Good or Evil. — The Second Half 
of Evolution. — The Decisive Turning-Point. — 
Spirituality and Intellect. — The Survival of the 
Fittest. — The Sixth Sense. — Development of 
the Principles in their Order. — The Subsidence 
of the Unfit. — Provision for All. — The Excep- 
tional Cases. — Their Scientific Explanation. — 
Justice Satisfied. — The Destiny of Failures. — 
Human Evolution Reviewed 188 

CHAPTER IX. 

BUDDHA. 

The Esoteric Buddha. — Re-Incarnations of Adepts. 

— Buddha's Incarnation. — The Seven Buddhas 
of the Great Races. — Avalokiteshwara. — Addi 
Buddha. — Adeptship in Buddha's Time. — San- 
karacharya. — Vedantin Doctrines. — Tsong-ka-pa. 

— Occult Reforms in Tibet 209 



CHAPTER X. 

NIRVANA. 

Its Remoteness. — Preceding Gradations. — Par- 
tial Nirvana. — The Threshold of Nirvana. — Nir- 



40 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

vana.— Para Nirvana. — Buddha and Nirvana. — 
Nirvana attained by Adepts. — General Progress 
towards Nirvana. — Conditions of its Attainment. 
— Spirituality and Religion. — The Pursuit of 
Truth 233 



CHAPTER XL 

THE UNIVERSE. 

The Days and Nights of Brahma. — The Various 
Manvantaras and Pralayas. — The Solar System. 
The Universal Pralaya. — Recommencement of 
Evolution. — " Creation." — The Great First 
Cause . _ The Eternal Cyclic Process .... 246 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 

Correspondences of the Esoteric Doctrine with Visi- 
ble Nature. — Free Will and Predestination.— 
The Origin of Evil. — Geology, Biology, and the 
Esoteric°Teaching.— Buddhism and Scholarship. 
_ The Origin of all Things. — The Doctrine as 
Distorted. — The Ultimate Dissolution of Con- 
sciousness. -Transmigration.- The Soul and the 
Spirit. — Personality and Individuality. — Karma 265 



ESOTEEIC BUDDHISM. 



CHAPTER I. 

ESOTERIC TEACHEES. 

The information contained in the following 
pages is no collection of inferences deduced 
from study. I am bringing to my readers 
knowledge which I have obtained by favor 
rather than by effort. It will not be found 
the less valuable on that account ; I venture, 
on the contrary, to declare that it will be found 
of incalculably greater value, easily as I have 
obtained it, than any results in a similar direc- 
tion which I could possibly have procured by 
ordinary methods of research, even had I pos- 
sessed, in the highest degree, that which I 
make no claim to possess at all, Oriental schol- 
arship. 

Every one who has been concerned with In- 
dian literature, and still more, any one who in 
India has taken interest in talking with culti- 
vated natives on philosophical subjects, will be 



42 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

aware of a general conviction existing in the 
East that there are men living who know a 
great deal more about philosophy, in the high- 
est acceptation of the word, — the science, the 
true knowledge of spiritual things, — than can 
be found recorded in any books. In Europe 
the notion of secrecy as applied to science is so 
repulsive to the prevailing instinct, that the 
first inclination of European thinkers is to deny 
the existence of that which they so much dis- 
like. Bat circumstances have fully assured me 
during my residence in India that the convic- 
tion just referred to is perfectly well founded, 
and I have been privileged at last to receive a 
very considerable mass of instruction in the 
hitherto secret knowledge over which Oriental 
philosophers have brooded silently till now; 
instruction which has hitherto been only im- 
parted to sympathetic students, prepared them- 
selves to migrate into the camp of secrecy. 
Their teachers have been more than content 
that all other inquirers should be left in doubt 
as to whether there was anything of importance 
to learn at their hands. 

With quite as much antipathy at starting 
as any one could have entertained to the old 
Oriental policy in regard to knowledge, I came 
nevertheless to perceive that the old Oriental 
knowledge itself was a very real and important 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 43 

possession. It may be excusable to regard the 
high grapes as sour, so long as they are quite 
out of reach ; but it would be foolish to persist 
in that opinion if a tall friend hands down a 
bunch, and one finds them sweet. 

For reasons that will appear, as the present 
explanations proceed, the very considerable 
block of hitherto secret teaching this volume 
contains, has been conveyed to me, not only 
without conditions of the usual kind, but to 
the express end that I might convey it in my 
turn to the world at large. 

Without the light of hitherto secret Oriental 
knowledge, it is impossible by any study of its 
published literature, English or Sanskrit, for 
students of even the most scholarly qualifica- 
tions to reach a comprehension of the inner 
doctrines and real meaning of any Oriental 
religion. This assertion conveys no reproach 
to the sympathetic, learned, and industrious 
writers of great ability who have studied Ori- 
ental religions generally, and Buddhism espe- 
cially, in their external aspects. Buddhism, 
above all, is a religion which has enjoyed a 
dual existence from the very beginning of its 
introduction to the world. The real inner 
meaning of its doctrines has been kept back 
from uninitiated students, while the outer 
teachings have merely presented the multitude 



44 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

with a code of moral lessons, and a veiled, 
symbolical literature, hinting at the existence 
of knowledge in the background. 

This secret knowledge, in reality, long ante- 
dated the passage through earth-life of Gau- 
tama Buddha. Brahmanical philosophy, in 
ages before Buddha, embodied the identical 
doctrine which may now be described as Eso- 
teric Buddhism. Its outlines had indeed been 
blurred, its scientific form partially confused, 
but the general body of knowledge was already 
in possession of a select few before Buddha 
came to deal with it. Buddha, however, un- 
dertook the task of revising and refreshing the 
esoteric science of the inner circle of initiates, 
as well as the morality of the outer world. The 
circumstances under which this work was done 
have been wholly misunderstood, nor would a 
straightforward explanation thereof be intelli- 
gible without explanations, which must first be 
furnished by a survey of the esoteric science 
itself. 

From Buddha's time till now the esoteric sci- 
ence referred to has been jealously guarded as 
a precious heritage belonging exclusively to 
regularly initiated members of mysteriously or- 
ganized associations. These, so 'far as Bud- 
dhism is concerned, are the Arahats, or, more 
properly, Arhats, referred to in Buddhist liter- 



. 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 45 

ature. They are the initiates who tread the 
" fourth path of holiness," spoken of in esoteric 
Buddhist writings. Mr. Rhys Davids, refer- 
ring to a multiplicity of original texts and 
Sanskrit authorities, says : " One might fill 
pages with the awe-struck and ecstatic praise 
which is lavished in Buddhist writings on this 
condition of mind, the fruit of the fourth path, 
the state of an Arahat, of a man made perfect 
according to the Buddhist faith." And then 
making a series of running quotations from 
Sanskrit authorities, he says : " To him who 
has finished the path and passed beyond sor- 
row, who has freed himself on all sides, thrown 
away every fetter, there is no more fever or 
grief. . . . For such there are no more births, 
. . . they are in the enjoyment of Nirvana. 
Their old karma is exhausted, no new karma 
is being produced ; their hearts are free from 
the longing after future life, and no new yearn- 
ings springing up within them, they, the wise, 
are extinguished like a lamp." These passages, 
and all like them, convey to European readers, 
at all events, an entirely false idea as to what 
sort of person an Arhat really is, as to the life 
he leads while on earth, and what he antici- 
pates later on. But the elucidation of such 
points may be postponed for the moment. 
Some further passages from exoteric treatises 



46 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

may first be selected to show what an Arhat is 
generally supposed to be. 

Mr. Rhys Davids, speaking of Jliana and 
Samadhi, — the belief that it was possible by 
intense self-absorption to attain supernatural 
faculties and powers, — goes on to say : " So 
far as I am aware, no instance is recorded of 
any one, not either a member of the order, 
or a Brahman ascetic, acquiring these powers. 
A Buddha always possessed them ; whether 
Arahats, as such, could work the particular 
miracles in question, and whether of mendicants 
only, Arahats or only Asekhas could do so, is at 
present not clear." Very little in the sources 
of information on the subject that have hitherto 
been explored will be found clear. But I am 
now merely endeavoring to show that Bud- 
dhist literature teems with allusions to the 
greatness and powers of the Arhats. For more 
intimate knowledge concerning them, special 
circumstances must furnish us with the required 
explanations. 

Mr. Arthur Lillie, in "Buddha and Early 
Buddhism," tells us : " Six supernatural fac- 
ulties were expected of the ascetic before he 
could claim the grade of Arhat. They are 
constantly alluded to in the Sutras as the six 
supernatural faculties, usually without further 
specification. . . . Man has a body composed 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 47 

of the four elements. ... In this transitory body 
his intelligence is enchained. The ascetic find- 
ing himself thus confused, directs his mind to 
the creation of the Manas. He represents to 
himself, in thought, another body created from 
this material body, — a body with a form, 
members, and organs. This body, in relation 
to the material body, is like the sword and the 
scabbard, or a serpent issuing from a basket in 
which it is confined. The ascetic then, purified 
and perfected, begins to practice supernatural 
faculties. He finds himself able to pass through 
material obstacles, walls, ramparts, etc. ; he is 
able to throw his phantasmal appearance into 
many places at once, ... he can leave this 
world and even reach the heaven of Brahma 
himself. . . . He acquires the power of hearing 
the sounds of the unseen world as distinctly as 
those of the phenomenal world, — more dis- 
tinctly, in point of fact. Also by the power of 
Manas he is able to read the most secret 
thoughts of others, and to tell their characters." 
And so on with illustrations. Mr. Lillie has 
not quite accurately divined the nature of the 
truth lying behind this popular version of the 
facts ; but it is hardly necessary to quote more 
to show that the powers of the Arhats and their 
insight into spiritual things are respected by 
the world of Buddhism most profoundly, even 



48 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

though the Arhats themselves have been singu- 
larly indisposed to favor the world with auto- 
biographies or scientific accounts of "the six 
supernatural powers." 

A few sentences from Mr. Hoey's recent 
translation of Dr. Oldenberg's "Buddha: his 
Life, his Doctrine, bis Order," may fall con- 
veniently into this place, and then we may pass 
on. We read : " Buddhist proverbial philos- 
ophy attributes in innumerable passages the 
possession of Nirvana to the saint who still 
treads the earth, ' The disciple who has put off 
lust and desire, rich in wisdom, has here on 
earth attained deliverance from death, the rest, 
the Nirvana, the eternal state. He who has 
escaped from the trackless hard mazes of the 
Sansara, who has crossed over and reached the 
shore, self - absorbed, without stumbling and 
without doubt, who has delivered himself from 
the earthly and attained Nirvana, him I call a 
true Brahman.' If the saint will even now put 
an end to his state of being, he can do so, but 
the majority stand fast until Nature has reached 
her goal ; of such may those words be said which 
are put in the mouth of the most prominent of 
Buddha's disciples, ' I long not for death ; 
I long not for life ; I wait till mine hour come, 
like a servant who awaiteth his reward..' * 

A multiplication of such quotations would 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 49 

merely involve the repetition in various forms 
of exoteric conceptions concerning the Arhats. 
Like every fact or thought in Buddhism, the 
Arhat has two aspects, that in which he is pre- 
sented to the world at large, and that in which 
he lives, moves, and has his being. In the 
popular estimation he is a saint waiting for a 
spiritual reward of the kind the populace can 
understand, — a wonder-worker meanwhile by 
favor of supernatural agencies. In reality he 
is the long-tried and proved-worthy custodian 
of the deepest and innermost philosophy of 
the one fundamental religion which Buddha re- 
freshed and restored, and a student of natural 
science standing in the very foremost front of 
human knowledge, in regard not merely to the 
mysteries of spirit, but to the material constitu- 
tion of the world as well. 

Arhat is a Buddhist designation. That 
which is more familiar in India, where the 
attributes of Arhatship are not necessarily 
associated with professions of Buddhism, is 
Mahatma. With stories about the Mahatmas 
India is saturated. > The older Mahatmas are 
generally spoken of as Rishis ; but the terms 
are interchangeable, and I have heard the title 
Rishi applied to men now living. All the at- 
tributes of the Arhats mentioned in Buddhist 
writings are described, with no less reverence, 
4 



50 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

in Indian literature as those of the Mahatmas ; 
and this volume might be readily filled with 
translations of vernacular books, giving accounts 
of miraculous achievements by such of them as 
are known to history and tradition by name. 

In reality, the Arhats and the Mahatmas are 
the same men. At that level of spiritual .ex- 
altation, supreme knowledge of the esoteric 
doctrine blends all original sectarian distinc- 
tions. By whatever name such illuminati may 
be called, they are the adepts of occult knowl- 
edge, sometimes spoken of in India now as the 
Brothers, and the custodians of the spiritual 
science which has been handed down to them 
by their predecessors. 

We may search both ancient and modern lit- 
erature in vain, however, for any systematic 
explanation of their doctrine or science. A 
good deal of this is dimly set forth in occult 
writing ; but very little of this is of the least 
use to readers who take up the subject without 
previous knowledge acquired independently of 
books. It is under favor of direct instruction 
from one of their numbers that I am now en' 
abled to attempt an outline of the Mahatmas' 
teaching, and it is in the same way that I have 
picked up what I know concerning the organ- 
ization to which most of them, and the great* 
est, in the present day belong. 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 51 

All over the world there are occultists of vari- | 
dus degrees of eminence, and occult fraternities 
even, which have a great deal in common with 
the leading fraternity now established in Tibet. 
But all my inquiries into the subject have con- 
vinced me that the Tibetan Brotherhood is ( 
incomparably the highest of such associations, 
and regarded as such by all other associations, 
- — worthy of being looked upon themselves as 
really " enlightened " in the occult sense of 
the term. There are, it is true, many isolated 
mystics in India who are altogether self-taught 
and unconnected with occult bodies. Many of 
these will explain that they themselves attain 
to higher pinnacles of spiritual enlightenment 
than the Brothers of Tibet, or any other peo- 
ple on earth. But the examination of such 
claims in all cases I have encountered would, 
I think, lead any impartial outsider, however 
little qualified himself by personal development 
to be a judge of occult enlightenment, to the 
conclusion that they are altogether unfounded. 
I know one native of India, for example, a man 
of European education, holding a high appoint- 
ment under government, of good station in 
society, most elevated character, and enjoying 
unusual respect with such Europeans as are 
concerned with him in official life, who will 
only accord to the Brothers of Tibet a second 



52 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

place in the world of spiritual enlightenment. / 
The first place he regards as occupied by one v 
person, now in this world no longer, — his own 
occult master in life, — whom he resolutely / 
asserts to have been an incarnation of the 
Supreme Being. His own (my friend's) inner 
senses were so far awakened by this Master, 
that the visions of his entranced state, into 
which he can still throw himself at will, are to 
him the only spiritual region in which he can 
feel interested. Convinced that the Supreme / 
Being was his personal instructor from the be- 
ginning, and continues so still in the subjective 
state, he is naturally inaccessible to suggestions 
that his impressions may be distorted by rea- 
son of his own misdirected psychological de- 
velopment. Again, the highly cultivated dev- 
otees, to be met with occasionally in India, 
who build up a conception of Nature, the uni- 
verse, and God entirely on a metaphysical 
basis, and who have evolved their systems by 
sheer force of transcendental thinking, will 
take some established system of philosophy as 
its groundwork, and amplify on this to an 
extent which only an Oriental metaphysician 
could dream of. They win disciples who put 
implicit faith in them, and found their little 
school, which flourishes for a time within its 
own limits ; but speculative philosophy of such 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 53 

a kind is rather occupation for the mind than 
knowledge. Such "Masters," by comparison 
with the organized adepts of the highest 
brotherhood, are like rowing boats compared 
with ocean steamships, — helpful conveyances 
on their own native lake or river, but not craft 
to whose protection you can trust yourself on a 
world-wide voyage of exploration over the sea. 

Descending lower again in the scale, we find 
India dotted all over with Yogis and Fakirs, in 
all stages of self-development, from that of dirty 
savages, but little elevated above the gypsy for- 
tune-tellers of an English race-course, to men 
whose seclusion a stranger will find it very dif- 
ficult to penetrate, and whose abnormal facul- 
ties and powers need only be seen or experi- 
enced to shatter the incredulity of the most 
contented representative of modern Western 
skepticism. Careless inquirers are very apt to 
confound such persons with the great adepts of 
whom they may vaguely hear. 

Concerning the real adepts, meanwhile, I 
cannot at present venture on any account of 
what the Tibetan organization is like, as re- 
gards its highest ruling authorities. Those 
Mahatmas themselves, of whom some more 
or less adequate conception may perhaps be 
formed by readers who will follow me pa- 
tiently to the end, are subordinate by several 



54 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

degrees to the chief of all. Let us deal rather 
with the earlier conditions of occult training, 
which can more easily be grasped. 

The level of elevation which constitutes a 
man — what the outer world calls a Mahatma 
or " Brother " — is only attained after pro- 
longed and weary probation, and anxious or- 
deals of really terrible severity. One may find 
people who have spent twenty or thirty years 
or more in blameless and arduous devotion to 
the life-task on which they have entered, and 
are still in the earlier degrees of chelaship, still 
looking up to the heights of adeptship as far 
above their heads. And at whatever age a boy 
or man dedicates himself to the occult career, 
he dedicates himself to it, be it remembered, 
without any reservations and for life. The task 
he undertakes is the development in himself of 
a great many faculties and attributes which are 
so utterly dormant in ordinary mankind, that 
their very existence is unsuspected, the possi- 
bility of their development denied. And these 
faculties and attributes must be developed by 
the chela himself, with very little, if any, help, 
beyond guidance and direction from his master. 
" The adept," says an occult aphorism, " be- 
comes : he is not made." One may illustrate 
this point by reference to a very commonplace 
physical exercise. Every man living, having 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 55 

the ordinary use of his limbs, is qualified to 
swim. But put those who, as the common 
phrase goes, cannot swim, into deep water, and 
they will struggle and be drowned. The mere 
way to move the limbs is no mystery ; but un- 
less the swimmer, in moving them, has a full 
belief that such movement will produce the 
required result, the required result is not pro- 
duced. In this case, we are dealing with me- 
chanical forces merely, but the same principle 
runs up into dealings with subtler forces. Very 
much further than people generally imagine 
will mere "confidence" carry the occult neo- 
phyte. How many European readers, who 
would be quite incredulous if told of some re- 
sults which occult chelas in the most incipient 
stages of their training have to accomplish by 
sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in 
church, nevertheless, the familiar biblical as- 
surances of the power which resides in faith, 
and let the words pass by like the wind, leav- 
ing no impression. 

The great end and purpose of adeptship is 
the achievement of spiritual development, the 
nature of which is only veiled and disguised 
by the common phrases of exoteric language. 
That the adept seeks to unite his soul with 
God, that he may thereby pass into Nirvana, is 
a statement that conveys no definite meaning 



56 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

to the ordinary reader ; and the more he ex- 
amines it with the help of ordinary books and 
methods, the less likely will he be to realize 
the nature of the process contemplated or of 
the condition desired. It will be necessary to 
deal first with the esoteric conception of Na- 
ture, and the origin and destinies of Man, 
which -differ widely from theological concep- 
tions, before an explanation of the aim which 
the adept pursues can become intelligible. 
Meanwhile, however, it is desirable, at the very 
outset, to disabuse the reader of one misconcep- 
tion in regard to the objects of adeptship that 
he may very likely have framed. 

The development of those spiritual faculties, 
whose culture has to do with the highest ob- 
jects of the occult life, gives rise as it pro- 
gresses to a great deal of incidental knowledge, 
having to do with physical laws of Nature not 
yet generally understood. This knowledge, and 
the practical art of manipulating certain ob- 
scure forces of Nature, which it brings in its 
train, invest an adept, and even an adept's 
pupils, at a comparatively early stage of their 
education, with very extraordinary powers, the 
application of which to matters of daily life 
will sometimes produce results that seem alto- 
gether miraculous ; and, from the ordinary 
point of view, the acquisition of apparently 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 57 

miraculous power is such a stupendous achieve- 
ment, that people are sometimes apt to fancy 
the adept's object in seeking the knowledge he 
attains has been to invest himself with these 
coveted powers. It would be as reasonable to 
say of any great patriot of military history that 
his object in becoming a soldier had been to 
wear a gay uniform and impress the imagina- 
tion of the nurse-maids. 

The Oriental method of cultivating knowl- 
edge has always differed diametrically from 
that pursued in the West during the growth 
of modern science. Whilst Europe has investi- 
gated Nature as publicly as possible, every step 
being discussed with the utmost freedom, and 
every fresh fact acquired circulated at once 
for the benefit of all, Asiatic science has been 
studied secretly and its conquests jealously 
guarded. I need not as yet attempt either 
criticism or defense of its methods. But at 
all events these methods have been relaxed to 
some extent in my own case ; and, as already 
stated, it is with the full consent of my teach- 
ers that I now follow the bent of my own in- 
clinations as a European, and communicate 
what I have learned to all who may be will- 
ing to receive it. Later on it will be seen how 
the departure from the ordinary rules of occult 
study embodied in the concessions now made, 
falls naturally into its place in the whole scheme 



58 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

of occult philosophy. The approaches to that 
philosophy have always been open, in one sense, 
to all. Vaguely throughout the world in vari- 
ous ways has been diffused the idea that some 
process of study which men here and there did 
actually follow, might lead to the acquisition of 
a higher kind of knowledge than that taught 
to mankind at large in books or by public relig- 
ious preachers. The East, as pointed out, has 
always been more than vaguely impressed with 
this belief; but even in the West the whole 
block of symbolical literature relating to astrol- 
ogy, alchemy, and mysticism generally has fer- 
mented in European society, carrying to some 
few peculiarly receptive and qualified minds 
the conviction that behind all this superficially 
meaningless nonsense great truths lay con- 
cealed. For such persons eccentric study has 
sometimes revealed hidden passages leading to 
the grandest imaginable realms of enlighten- 
ment. But till now, in all such cases, in ac- 
cordance with the law of those schools, the neo- 
phyte no sooner forced his way into the region 
of mystery, than he was bound over to the most 
inviolable secrecy as to everything connected 
with his entrance and further progress there. 
In Asia, in the same way, the chela, or pupil 
of occultism, no sooner became a chela than he 
ceased to be a witness on behalf of the reality 
of occult knowledge. I have been astonished 



ESOTERIC TEACHERS. 59 

to find, since my own connection with the sub- 
ject, how numerous such chelas are. But it is 
impossible to imagine any human act more im- 
probable than the unauthorized revelation by 
any such chela, to persons in the outer world, 
that he is one ; and so the great esoteric school 
of philosophy successfully guards its seclusion. 

In a former book, " The Occult World," I 
have given a full and straightforward narrative 
of the circumstances under which I came in con- 
tact with the gifted and deeply instructed men 
from whom I have since obtained the teaching 
this volume contains. I need not repeat the 
story. I now come forward prepared to deal 
with the subject in a new way. The existence 
of occult adepts, and the importance of their 
acquirements, may be established along two dif- 
ferent lines of argument: firstly, by means of 
external evidence, — the testimony of qualified 
witnesses, the manifestation by or through per- 
sons connected with adepts of abnormal facul- 
ties, affording more than a presumption of ab- 
normally enlarged knowledge ; secondly, by the 
presentation of such a considerable portion of 
this knowledge as may convey intrinsic assur- 
ances of its own value. My first book pro- 
ceeded by the former method ; I now approach 
the more formidable task of working on the 
latter. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 

A SUEVEY of cosmogony, as comprehended 
by occult science, must precede any attempt to 
explain the means by which a knowledge of 
that cosmogony itself has been acquired. The 
methods of esoteric research have grown out 
of natural facts, with which exoteric science is 
wholly unacquainted. These natural facts are 
concerned with the premature development in 
occult adepts of faculties which mankind at 
large has not yet evolved ; and these faculties, 
in turn, enable their possessors to explore the 
mysteries of Nature, and verify the esoteric 
doctrines, setting forth its grand design. The 
practical student of occultism may develop the 
faculties first, and apply them to the observa- 
tion of Nature afterwards; but the exhibition 
of the theory of Nature for Western readers 
merely seeking its intellectual comprehension, 
must precede consideration of the inner senses, 
which occult research employs. On the other 
hand, a survey of cosmogony, as comprehended 



THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN, 61 

by occult science, could only be scientifically 
arranged at the expense of intelligibility for 
European readers. To begin at the beginning, 
we should endeavor to realize the state of the 
universe before evolution sets in. This subject 
is by no means shirked by esoteric students; 
and later on, in the course of this sketch, some 
hints will be given concerning the views occult- 
ism entertains of the earlier processes through 
which cosmic matter passes on its way to evolu- 
tion. But an orderly statement of the earliest 
processes of Nature would embody references 
to man's spiritual constitution, which would 
not be understood without some preliminary 
explanation. 

Seven distinct principles are recognized by 
esoteric science as entering into the consti- 
tution of man. The classification differs so 
widely from any with which European readers 
will be familiar, that I shall naturally be asked 
for the grounds on which occultism reaches so 
far-fetched a conclusion. But I must, on ac- 
count of inherent peculiarities in the subject, 
which will be comprehended later on, beg for 
this Oriental knowledge I am bringing home a 
hearing (in the first instance, at all events) of 
the Oriental kind The Oriental and the Eu- 
ropean systems of conveying knowledge are as 
unlike as any two methods can be. The West 



62 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

pricks and piques the learner's controversial 
instinct at every step. He is encouraged to 
dispute and resist conviction. He is forbidden 
to take any scientific statement on authority. 
Pari passu, as he acquires knowledge, he must 
learn how that knowledge has been acquired, 
and he is made to feel that no fact is worth 
knowing, unless he knows, with it, the way to 
prove it a fact. The East manages its pupils 
on a wholly different plan. It no more disre- 
gards the necessity of proving its teaching than 
the West, but it provides proof of a wholly dif- 
ferent sort. It enables the student to search 
Nature for himself, and verify its teachings, in 
those regions which Western philosophy can 
only invade by speculation and argument. It 
never takes the trouble to argue about any- 
thing. It says : " So and so is fact ; here is 
the key of knowledge ; now go and see for 
yourself." In this way it comes to pass that 
teaching per se is never anything else but 
teaching on authority. Teaching and proof 
do not go hand in hand ; they follow one an- 
other in due order. A further consequence of 
this method is that Eastern philosophy employs 
the method which we in the West have dis- 
carded for good reasons as incompatible with 
our own line of intellectual development, — the 
system of reasoning from generals to particu- 



THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 63 

lars. The purposes which European science 
usually has in view would certainly not be an- 
swered by that plan, but I think that any one 
who goes far in the present inquiry will feel 
that the system of reasoning up from the de- 
tails of knowledge to general inferences is in- 
applicable to the work in hand. One cannot 
understand details in this department of knowl- 
edge till we get a general understanding of the 
whole scheme of things. Even to convey this 
general comprehension by mere language is a 
large and by no means an easy task. To pause 
at every moment of the exposition in order to 
collect what separate evidence may be avail- 
able for the proof of each separate statement, 
would be practically impossible. Such a method 
would break down the patience of the reader, 
and prevent him from deriving, as he may from 
a more condensed treatise, that definite concep- 
tion as to what the esoteric doctrine means to 
teach, which it is my business to evoke. 

The reflection may suggest, in passing, a new 
view, having an intimate connection with our 
present subject, of the Platonic and Aristotelian 
systems of reasoning. Plato's system, roughly 
described as reasoning from universals to partic- 
ulars, is condemned by modern habits in favor 
of the later and exactly inverse system. But 
Plato was in fetters in attempting to defend his 



64 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

system. There is every reason to believe that 
his familiarity with esoteric science prompted 
his method, and that the usual restrictions un- 
der which he labored, as an initiated occultist, 
forbade him from saying as much as would 
really justify it. No one can study even as 
much occult science as this volume contains, 
and then turn to Plato, or even to any intelli- 
gent epitome of Plato's system of thought, with- 
out finding correspondences cropping out at 
every turn. 

The higher principles of the series which go 
to constitute man are not fully developed in the 
mankind with which we are as yet familiar, 
but a complete or perfect man would be resolv- 
able into the following elements. To facilitate 
the application of these explanations to ordi- 
nary exoteric Buddhist writings, the Sanskrit 
names of these principles are given, as well as 
suitable terms in English. 1 

i The nomenclature here adopted differs slightly from that hit 
upon when some of the present teachings were first given out in a 
fragmentary form in The Theosoph/st. Later on it will be seen that 
the names now preferred embod}' a fuller conception of the whole 
system, and avoid some difficulties to which the earlier names give 
rise. If the earlier presentations of esoteric science were thus im- 
perfect, one can hardly be surprised at so natural a consequence 
of the difficulties under which its English exponents labored. But 
no substantial errors have to be confessed or deplored. The con- 
notations of the present names are more accurate than those of the 
phrases first selected, but the explanations originally given, as far 
as they went, were quite in harmony with those now developed. 



TEE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 65 

1. The Body Rupa. 

2. Vitality Prana, or Jiva. 

3. Astral Body Linga Sharira. 

4. Animal Soul Kama Rupa. 

5. Human Soul Manas. 

6. Spiritual Soul Buddhi. 

7. Spirit Atma. 

Directly conceptions so transcendental as 
some of those included in this analysis are set 
forth in a tabular statement, they seem to incur 
certain degradation, against which, in endeav- 
oring to realize clearly what is meant, we must 
be ever on our guard. Certainly it would be 
impossible for even the most skillful professor 
of occult science to exhibit each of these princi- 
ples separate and distinct from the others, as 
the physical elements of a compound body can 
be separated oy analysis and preserved inde- 
pendently of each other. The elements of a 
physical body are all on the same plane of ma- 
teriality, but the elements of man are on very 
different planes. The finest gases of which 
the body may to some extent be chemically 
composed are still, on one scale at all Bvents, 
on nearly the lowest level of materiality. The 
second principle which, by its union with gross 
matter, changes it from what we generally call 
inorganic, or what might more properly be 
called inert, into living matter, is at once a 



66 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

something different from the finest example of 
matter in its lower state. Is the second princi- 
ple, then, anything that we can truly call mat- 
ter at all? The question lands us, thus, at the 
very outset of this inquiry, in the middle of the 
subtle metaphysical discussion as to whether 
force and matter are different or identical. 
Enough for the moment to state that occult 
science regards them as identical, and that it 
contemplates no principle in Nature as wholly 
immaterial. In this way, though no concep- 
tions of the universe, of man's destiny, or of 
Nature generally, are more spiritual than those 
of occult science, that science is wholly free 
from the logical error of attributing material 
results to immaterial causes. The esoteric doc- 
trine is thus really the missing link between 
materialism and spirituality. 

The clue to the mystery involved lies of 
course in the fact, directly cognizable by occult 
experts, that matter exists in other states be- 
sides those which are cognizable by the five 
senses. 

The second principle of man, Vitality, thus 
consists of matter in its aspect as force ; and 
its affinity for the grosser state of matter is so 
great that it cannot be separated from any 
given particle or mass of this, except by instan- 
taneous translation to some other particle or 



TEE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 67 

mass. When a man's body dies, by desertion 
of the higher principles which have rendered it 
a Hying reality, the second, or life principle, no 
longer a unity itself, is nevertheless inherent 
still in the particles of the body as this decom- 
poses, attaching itself to other organisms to 
which that very process of decomposition gives 
rise. Bury the body in the earth, and its Jiva 
will attach itself to the vegetation which springs 
above, or the lower animal forms which evolve 
from its substance. Burn the body, and inde- 
structible Jiva flies back none the less instan- 
taneously to the body of the planet itself from 
which it was originally borrowed, entering into 
some new combination as its affinities may de- 
termine. 

The third principle, the Astral Body, or 
Linga Sharira, is an ethereal duplicate of the 
physical body, its original design. It guides 
Jiva in its work on the physical particles, and 
causes it to build up the shape which these 
assume. Vitalized itself by the higher princi- 
ples, its unity is only preserved by the union of 
the whole group. At death it is disembodied 
for a brief period, and, under some abnormal 
conditions, may even be temporarily visible to 
the external sight of still living persons. Under 
such conditions it is taken of course for the 
ghost of the departed person. Spectral appari- 



68 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

tions may sometimes be occasion ed in other 
ways, but the third principle, when that results 
in a visible phenomenon, is a mere aggregation 
of molecules in a peculiar state, having no life 
or consciousness of any kind whatever. It is 
no more a being than any cloud-wreath in the 
sky which happens to settle into the semblance 
of some animal form. Broadly speaking, the 
Linga Sharira never leaves the body except at 
death, nor migrates far from the body even in 
that case. When seen at all, and this can but 
rarely occur, it can only be seen near where the 
physical body still lies. In some very peculiar 
cases of spiritualistic mediumship, it may for a 
short time exude from the physical body and be 
visible near it, but the medium in such cases 
stands the while in considerable danger of his 
life. Disturb unwillingly the conditions under 
which the Linga Sharira was set free, and its 
return might be impeded. The second prin- 
ciple would then soon cease to animate the 
physical body as a unity, and death would 
ensue. 

During the last year or two, while hints and 
scraps of occult science have been finding their 
way out into the world, the expression "Astral 
Body " has been applied to a certain semblance 
of the human form, fully inhabited by its higher 
principles, which can migrate to any distance 



THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN. 69 

from the physical body, projected consciously 
and with exact intention by a living adept, or 
unintentionally, by the accidental application 
of certain mental forces to his loosened princi- 
ples, by any person at the moment of death. 
For ordinary purposes there is no practical in- 
convenience in using the expression " Astral 
Body" for the appearance so projected; in- 
deed, any more strictly accurate expression, as 
will be seen directly, would be cumbersome, 
and we must go on using the phrase in both 
meanings. No confusion need arise; but, 
strictly speaking, the Linga Sharira, or third 
principle, is the Astral Body, and that cannot 
be sent about as the vehicle of the higher prin- 
ciples. 

The three lower principles, it will be seen, 
are altogether of the earth, perishable in their 
nature as a single entity, though indestructible 
as regards their molecules, and absolutely done 
with by man at his death. 

The fourth principle is the first of those 
which belong to man's higher nature. The 
Sanskrit designation, Jcama rupa, is often trans- 
lated " Body of Desire," which seems rather a 
clumsy and inaccurate form of words. A closer 
translation, having regard to meanings rather 
than words, would, perhaps, be " Vehicle of 
Will," but the name already adopted above, 



70 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Animal Soul, may be more accurately sugges- 
tive still. 

In "The Theosophist " for October, 1881, 
when the first hints about the septenary con- 
stitution of man were given out, the fifth prin- 
ciple was called the animal soul, as contra-dis- 
tinguished from the sixth or " spiritual soul ;." 
but though this nomenclature sufficed to mark 
the required distinction, it degraded the fifth 
principle, which is essentially the human prin- 
ciple. Though humanity is animal in its na- 
ture as compared with spirit, it is elevated 
above the correctly defined animal creation in 
every other aspect. By introducing a new 
name for the fifth principle, we are enabled to 
throw back the designation " animal soul " to 
its proper place. This arrangement need not 
interfere, meanwhile, with an appreciation of 
the way in which the fourth principle is the 
seat of that will or desire to which the Sanskrit 
name refers. And, withal, the Kama Rupa is 
the animal soul, the highest developed principle 
of the brute creation, susceptible of evolution 
into something far higher by its union with 
the growing fifth principle in man, but still 
the animal soul which man is by no means yet 
without, the seat of all animal desires, and a 
potent force in the human body as well, press^ 
ing upward, so to speak, as well as downward, 



THE CONSTITUTION Oh MAN. 71 

and capable of influencing the fifth, for practi- 
cal purposes, as well as of being influenced by 
the fifth for its own control and improvement. 

The fifth principle, human soul, or Manas 
(as described in Sanskrit in one of its aspects), 
is the seat of reason and memory. It is a por- 
tion of this principle, animated by the fourth, 
which is really projected to distant places by 
an adept, when he makes an appearance in 
what is commonly called his astral body. 

Now the fifth principle, or human soul, in 
the majority of mankind is not even yet fully 
developed. This fact about the imperfect de- 
velopment as yet of the higher principles is 
very important. We cannot get a correct con- 
ception of the present place of man in Nature 
if we make the mistake of regarding him as a 
fully perfected being already. And that mis- 
take would be fatal to any reasonable anticipa- 
tions concerning the future that awaits him, — 
fatal also to any appreciation of the appropri- 
ateness of the future which the esoteric doctrine 
explains to us as actually awaiting him. 

Since the fifth principle is not yet fully de- 
veloped, it goes without saying that the sixth 
principle is still in embryo. This idea has been 
variously indicated in recent forecasts of the 
great doctrine. Sometimes, it has been said, 
we do not truly possess any sixth principle, we 



72 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

merely have germs of a sixth principle. It has 
also been said, the sixth principle is not in us ; 
it hovers over us ; it is a something that the 
highest aspirations of our nature must work up 
toward. But it is also said: All things, not 
man alone, but every animal, plant, and min- 
eral, have their seven principles, and the high- 
est principle of all — the seventh itself — vital- 
izes that continuous thread of life which runs 
all through evolution, uniting into a definite 
succession the almost innumerable incarnations 
of that one life which constitute a complete se- 
ries. We must imbibe all these various con- 
ceptions, and weld them together, or extract 
their essence, to learn the doctrine of the sixth 
principle. Following the order of ideas which 
just now suggested the application of the term 
animal soul to the fourth principle and human 
soul to the fifth, the sixth may be called the 
spiritual soul of man, and the seventh, there- 
fore, spirit itself. 

In another aspect of the idea, the sixth prin- 
ciple may be called the vehicle of the seventh, 
and the fourth the vehicle of the fifth ; but yet 
another mode of dealing with the problem 
teaches us to regard each of the higher princi- 
ples, from the fourth upwards, as a vehicle of 
what, in Buddhist philosophy, is called the One 
Life or Spirit. According to this view of the 



THE CONSTITUTION OF M AN. 73 

matter the one life is that which perfects, by 
inhabiting the various vehicles. In the animal 
the one life is concentrated in the kama rupa. 
In man it begins to penetrate the fifth princi- 
ple as well. In perfected man it penetrates the 
sixth, and when it penetrates the seventh, man 
ceases to be man, and attains a wholly superior 
condition of existence. % 

This latter view of the position is especially 
valuable as guarding against the notion that 
the four higher principles are like a bundle of 
sticks tied together, but each having individu- 
alities of its own if untied. Neither the ani- 
mal soul alone, nor the spiritual soul alone, has 
any individuality at all ; but, on the other 
hand, the fifth principle would be incapable of 
separation from the others in such a way, that 
its individuality would be preserved while both 
the deserted principles would be left uncon- 
scious. It has been said that the finer princi- 
ples themselves even are material and molecu- 
lar in their constitution, though composed of a 
higher order of matter than the physical senses 
can take note of. So they are separable, and 
the sixth principle itself can be imagined as di- 
vorcing itself from its lower neighbor. But in 
that state of separation, and at this stage of 
mankind's development, it could simply re-in- 
carnate itself in such an emergency 5 and grow 



74 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

a new fifth principle by contact with a human 
organism ; in such a case, the fifth principle 
would lean upon and become one with the 
fourth, and be proportionately degraded. And 
yet this fifth principle, which cannot stand 
alone, is the personality of the man ; and its 
cream, in union with the sixth, his continuous 
individuality through successive lives. 

The circumstances and attractions under the 
influence of which the principles do divide up, 
and the manner in which the consciousness of 
man is dealt with then, will be discussed later 
on. Meanwhile, a better understanding of the 
whole position than could ensue from a contin- 
ued prosecution of the inquiry on these lines 
now will be obtained by turning first to the 
processes of evolution by means of which the 
principles of man have been developed. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 

Esoteric Science, though the most spirit- 
ual system imaginable, exhibits, as running 
throughout Nature, the most exhaustive system 
of evolution that the human mind can conceive. 
The Darwinian theory of evolution is simply 
an independent discovery of a portion — unhap- 
pily but a small portion — of the vast natural 
truth. But occultists know how to explain 
evolution without degrading the highest prin- 
ciples of man. The esoteric doctrine finds it- 
self under no obligation to keep its science and 
religion in separate water-tight compartments. 
Its theory of physics and its theory of spirit- 
uality are not only reconcilable with each 
other, they are intimately blended together and 
interdependent. And the first great fact which 
occult science presents to our notice in refer- 
ence to the origin of man on this globe will be 
seen to help the imagination over some serious 
embarrassments of the familiar scientific idea 
of evolution. The evolution of man is not a 



76 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

process carried out on this planet alone. It is 
a result to which many worlds in different con- 
ditions of material and spiritual development 
have contributed. If this statement were 
merely put forward as a conjecture, it would 
surely recommend itself forcibly to rational 
minds. For there is a manifest irrationality in 
the commonplace notion that man's existence 
is divided into a material beginning, lasting 
sixty or seventy years, and a spiritual remain- 
der lasting forever. The irrationality amounts 
to absurdity when it is alleged that the acts of 
the sixty or seventy years — the blundering, 
helpless acts of ignorant human life — are per- 
mitted by the. perfect justice of an all-wise 
Providence to define the conditions of that 
later life of infinite duration. Nor is it less ex- 
travagant to imagine that, apart from the ques- 
tion of justice, the life beyond the grave should 
be exempt from the law of change, progress, 
and improvement, which every analogy of Na- 
ture points to as probably running through all 
the varied existences of the universe. But once 
abandon the idea of a uniform, unvarying, un- 
progressive life beyond the grave, once admit 
the conception of change and progress in that 
life, and we admit the idea of a variety hardly 
compatible with any other hypothesis than that 
of progress through successive worlds. As we 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 77 

have said before, this is not hypothesis at all 
for occult science, but a fact, ascertained and 
verified beyond the reach (for occultists) of 
doubt or contradiction. 

The life and evolutionary processes of this 
planet — in fact, all which constitutes it some- 
thing more than a dead lump of chaotic matter 
— are linked with the life and evolutionary 
processes of several other planets. But let it 
not be supposed that there is no finality as re- 
gards the scheme of this planetary union to 
which we belong. The human imagination 
once set free is apt sometimes to bound too far. 
Once let this notion, that the earth is merely 
one link in a mighty chain of worlds, be fully 
accepted as probable, or true, and it may sug- 
gest the whole starry heavens as the heritage 
of the human family. That idea would involve 
a serious misconception. One globe does not 
afford Nature scope for the processes by which 
mankind has been evoked from chaos, but these 
processes do not require more than a limited 
and definite number of globes. Separated as 
these are, in regard to the gross mechanical 
matter of which they consist, they are closely 
and intimately bound together by subtle cur- 
rents and forces, whose existence reason need 
not be much troubled to concede since the ex- 
istence of some connection — of force or ethereal 



T8 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

media — -uniting all visible celestial bodies is 
proved by the mere fact that they are visible. 
It is along these subtle currents that the life- 
elements pass from world to world. 

The fact, however, will at once be liable to 
distortion to suit preconceived habits of mind. 
Some readers may imagine our meaning to.be 
that after death the surviving soul will be 
drawn into the currents of that world with 
which its affinities connect it. The real process 
is more methodical. The system of worlds is 
a circuit round which all individual spiritual 
entities have alike to pass ; and that passage 
constitutes the Evolution of Man. For it must 
be realized that the evolution of man is a proc- 
ess still going on, and by no means yet com- 
plete. Darwinian writings have taught the 
modern world to regard the ape as an ancestor, 
but the simple conceit of Western speculation 
has rarely permitted European evolutionists to 
look in the other direction and recognize the 
probability, that to our remote descendants we 
may be, as that unwelcome progenitor to us. 
Yet the two facts just declared hinge together. 
The higher evolution will be accomplished by 
our progress through the successive worlds of 
the system ; and in higher forms we shall re- 
turn to this earth again and again. But the 
avenues of thought through which we look for- 



TEE PLANETARY CHAIN. 79 

ward to this prospect are of almost inconceiv- 
able length. 

It will readily be supposed that the chain of 
worlds to which this earth belongs are not all 
prepared for a material existence exactly, or 
even approximately resembling our own. There 
would be no meaning in an organized chain of 
worlds which were all alike, and might as well 
all have been amalgamated into one. In real- 
ity the worlds with which we are connected 
are very unlike each other, not merely in out- 
ward conditions, but in that supreme character- 
istic, the proportion in which spirit and matter 
are mingled in their constitution. Our own 
world presents us with conditions in which spirit 
and matter are, on the whole, evenly balanced 
in equilibrium. Let it not be supposed on that 
account that it is very highly elevated in the 
scale of perfection. On the contrary, it occu- 
pies a very low place in that scale. The worlds 
that are higher in the scale are those in which 
spirit largely predominates. There is another 
world attached to the chain, rather than form- 
ing a part of it, in which matter asserts itself 
even more decisively than on earth, but this 
may be spoken of later. 

That the superior worlds which man may 
come to inhabit in his onward progress should 
gradually become more and more spiritual in 



80 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

their constitution — life there being more and 
more successfully divorced from gross material 
needs — will seem reasonable enough at the first 
glance. But the first glance in imagination at 
those which might conversely be called the infe- 
rior, but may with less inaccuracy be spoken of 
as the preceding worlds, would perhaps suggest 
that they ought to be conversely less spiritual, 
more material, than this earth. The fact is quite 
the other way, and must be so, it will be seen on 
reflection, in a chain of worlds which is an end- 
less chain — i.e., round and round which the 
evolutionary process travels. If that process 
had merely one journey to travel along a path 
which never returned into itself, one could 
think of it, at any rate, as working from almost 
absolute matter, up to almost absolute spirit ; 
but Nature works always in complete curves, 
and travels always in paths which return into 
themselves. The earliest, as also the latest, 
developed worlds — for the chain itself has 
grown by degrees — the furthest back, as also 
the furthest forward, are the most immaterial, 
the most ethereal of the whole series ; and that 
this is in all ways in accordance with the fitness 
of things will appear from the reflection that 
the furthest forward of the worlds is not a re- 
gion of finality, but the stepping-stone to the 
furthest back, as the month of December leads 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 81 

us back again to January. But it is not a cli- 
max of development from which the individual 
monad falls, as by a catastrophe, into the state 
from which he slowly began to ascend millions 
of years previously. From that which, for rea- 
sons which will soon appear, must be consid- 
ered the highest world on the ascending arc of 
.the circle to that which must be regarded as 
the first on the descending arc, in one sense the 
lowest — i. <?., in the order of development — 
there is no descent at all, but still ascent and 
progress. For the spiritual monad or entity, 
which has worked its way all round the cycle 
of evolution, at any one of the many stages of 
development into which the various existences 
around us may be grouped, begins its next cycle 
at the next higher stage, and is thus still ac- 
complishing progress as it passes from world 
Z back again to world A. Many times does it 
circle, in this way, right round the system, but 
its passage round must not be thought of merely 
as a circular revolution in an orbit. In the 
scale of spiritual perfection it is constantly as- 
cending. Thus, if we compare the system of 
worlds to a system of towers standing on a 
plain — towers each of many stories and sym- 
bolizing the scale of perfection — the spiritual 
monad performs a spiral progress round and 
round the series, passing through each tower, 



82 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

every time it comes round to it, at a higher 
level than before. 

It is for want of realizing this idea that spec- 
ulation, concerned with physical evolution, is 
so constantly finding itself stopped by dead 
walls. It is searching for its missing links in a 
world where it can never find them now, for 
they were but required for a temporary pur- 
pose, and have passed awa}'. Man, says the 
Darwinian, was once an ape. Quite true ; but 
the ape known to the Darwinian will never be- 
come a man — i. e., the form will not change 
from generation to generation till the tail dis- 
appears and the hands turn into feet, and so on. 
Ordinary science avows that, though changes of 
form can be detected in progress within the lim- 
its of species, the changes from species to species 
can only be inferred ; and to account for these, 
it is content to assume great intervals of time 
and the extinction of the intermediate forms. 
There has been no doubt an extinction of the 
intermediate or earlier forms of all species (in 
the larger acceptation of the word) — i. e., of all 
kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, animal, man, etc. 
— but ordinary science can merely guess that 
to have been the fact without realizing the con- 
ditions which rendered it inevitable, and which 
forbid the renewed generation of the interme« 
diate forms. 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 83 

It is the spiral character of the progress ac- 
complished by the life impulses that develop the 
various kingdoms of Nature, which accounts 
for the gaps now observed in the animated 
forms which people the earth. The thread of a 
screw, which is a uniform inclined plane in real- 
ity, looks like a succession of steps when ex- 
amined only along one line parallel to its axis. 
The spiritual monads, which are coming round 
the system on the animal level, pass on to other 
worlds when they have performed their turn 
of animal incarnation here. By the time they 
come again, they are ready for human incarna- 
tion, and there is no necessity now for the up- 
ward development of animal forms into human 
forms — these are already waiting for their spir- 
itual tenants. But, if we go back far enough, 
we come to a period at which there were no 
human forms ready developed on the earth. 
When spiritual monads, traveling on the ear- 
liest or lowest human level, were thus begin- 
ning to come round, their onward pressure in a 
world at that time containing none but animal 
forms provoked the improvement of the high- 
est of these into the required form — the much- 
talked-of missing link. 

In one way of looking at the matter, it may 
be contended that this explanation is identical 
with the inference of the Darwinian evolution- 



84 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ist in regard to the development and extinction 
of missing links. After all, it may be argued 
by a materialist, " we are not concerned to ex- 
press an opinion as to the origin of the tendency 
in species to develop higher forms. We say 
that they do develop these higher forms by 
intermediate links, and that the intermediate 
links die out ; and you say just the same thing." 
But there is a distinction between the two ideas 
for any one who can follow subtle distinctions. 
The natural process of evolution, from the influ- 
ence of local circumstances and sexual selection, 
must not be credited with producing intermedi- 
ate forms, and this is why it is inevitable that 
the intermediate forms should be of a tempo- 
rary nature and should die out. Otherwise, 
we should rind the world stocked with missing 
links of all kinds, animal life creeping by 
plainly apparent degrees up to manhood, human 
forms mingling in indistinguishable confusion 
with those of animals. The impulse to the 
new evolution of higher forms is really given, as 
we have shown, by rushes of spiritual monads 
coming round the cycle in a state fit for the 
inhabitation of new forms. These superior life 
impulses burst the chrysalis of the older form 
on the planet they invade, and throw off an ef- 
florescence of something higher. The forms 
which have gone on merely repeating them- 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 85 

selves for millenniums start afresh into growth ; 
with relative rapidi+y they rise through the 
intermediate into the higher forms, and then, 
as these in turn are multiplied with the vigor 
and rapidity of all new growths, they supply 
tenements of flesh for the spiritual entities com- 
ing round on that stage or plane of existence, 
and for the intermediate forms there are no 
longer any tenants offering. Inevitably they 
become extinct. 

Thus is evolution accomplished, as regards its 
essential impulse, by a spiral progress through 
the worlds. In the course of explaining this 
idea we have partly anticipated the declaration 
of another fact of first-rate importance as an aid 
to correct views of the world-system to which 
we belong. That is, that the tide of life — the 
wave of existence, the spiritual impulse, call 
it by what name we please — passes on from 
planet to planet by rushes, or gushes, not by an 
even continuous flow. For the momentary pur- 
pose of illustrating the idea in hand, the process 
may be compared to the filling of a series of 
holes or tubs sunk in the ground, such as may 
sometimes be seen at the mouths of feeble 
springs, and connected with each other by little 
surface channels. The stream from the spring, 
as it flows, is gathered up entirely in the begin- 
ning by the first hole, or tub A, and it is only 



86 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

when this is quite full that the continued in- 
pouring of water from the spring causes that 
which it already contains to overflow into tub 
B. This in turn fills and overflows along the 
channel which leads to tub C, and so on. Now, 
though, of course, a clumsy analogy of this kind 
will not carry us very far, it precisely illustrates 
the evolution of life on a chain of worlds like 
that we are attached to, and, indeed, the evolu- 
tion of the worlds themselves. For the process 
which goes on does not involve the preexistence 
of a chain of globes which Nature proceeds to 
stock with life ; but it is one in which the evo- 
lution of each globe is the result of previous ev- 
olutions, and the consequence of certain im- 
pulses thrown off from its predecessor in the 
superabundance of their development. Now, it 
is necessary to deal with this characteristic of 
the process to be described, but directly we be- 
gin to deal with it we have to go back in imag- 
ination to a period in the development of our 
system very far antecedent to that which is spec- 
ially our subject at present — the evolution of 
man. And manifestly, as soon as we begin 
talking of the beginnings of worlds, we are 
dealing with phenomena which can have had 
very little to do with life, as we understand the 
matter, and, therefore, it may be supposed, noth- 
ing to do with life impulses. But let us go 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 81 

back by degrees. Behind the human harvest 
of the life impulse there lay the harvest of 
mere animal forms, as every one realizes; be- 
hind that, the harvest or growths of mere vege- 
table forms — for some of these undoubtedly 
preceded the appearance of the earliest animal 
life on the planet. Then, before the vegetable 
organizations, there were mineral organizations, 
— for even a mineral is a product of Nature, an 
evolution from something behind it, as every 
imaginable manifestation of Nature must be, 
until in the vast series of manifestations the 
mind travels back to the unmanifested begin- 
ning of all things. On pure metaphysics of 
that sort we are not now engaged. It is enough 
to show that we may as reasonably — and that 
we must if we would talk about these matters 
at all — conceive a life impulse giving birth to 
mineral forms as of the same sort of impulse 
concerned to raise a race of apes into a race of 
rudimentary men. Indeed, occult science trav- 
els back even further in its exhaustive analysis 
of evolution than the period at which minerals 
began to assume existence. In the process of 
developing worlds from fiery nebulse, Nature 
begins with something earlier than minerals — 
with the elemental forces that underlie the phe- 
nomena of Nature as visible now and perceptible 
to the senses of man. But that branch of the 



88 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

subject may be left alone for the present. Let 
us take up the process at the period when the 
first world of the series, globe A let us call it f 
is merely a congeries of mineral forms. Now 
it must be remembered that globe A has already 
been described as very much more ethereal, 
more predominated by spirit, as distinguished 
from matter, than the globe of which we at 
present are having personal experience, so that 
a large allowance must be made for that state 
of things when we ask the reader to think of it, 
at starting, as a mere congeries of mineral forms. 
Mineral forms may be mineral in the sense of 
not belonging to the higher forms of vegetable 
organism, and may yet be very immaterial as 
we think of matter, very ethereal, consisting of 
a very fine or subtle quality of matter, in which 
the other pole or characteristic of Nature, spirit, 
largely predominates. The minerals we are 
trying to portray are, as it were, the ghosts of 
minerals ; by no means the highly-finished and 
beautiful, hard crystals which the mineralogical 
cabinets of this world supply. In these lower 
spirals of evolution with which we are now 
dealing, as with the higher ones, there is prog- 
ress from world to world, and that is the great 
point at which we have been aiming. There is 
progress downwards, so to speak, in finish and 
materiality and consistency ; and then, again, 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 89 

progress upward in spirituality as coupled with 
the finish which matter or materiality rendered 
possible in the first instance. It will be found 
that the process of evolution in its higher stages 
as regards man is carried on in exactly the same 
way. All through these studies, indeed, it will 
be found that one process of Nature typifies 
another, that the big is the repetition of the lit- 
tle on a larger scale. 

It is manifest from what we have already 
said, and in order that the progress of organ- 
isms on globe A shall be accounted for, that 
the mineral kingdom will no more develop the 
vegetable kingdom on globe A until it receives 
an impulse from without, than the earth was 
able to develop man from the ape till it re- 
ceived an impulse from without. But it will 
be inconvenient at present to go back to a con- 
sideration of the impulses which operate on 
globe A in the beginning of the system's con- 
struction. 

We have already, in order to be able to ad- 
vance more comfortably from a far later period 
than that to which we have now receded, gone 
back so far that further recession would change 
the whole character of this explanation. We 
must stop somewhere, and for the present it 
will be best to take the life impulses behind 
globe A for granted. And having stopped 



90 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

there we may now treat the enormous period 
intervening between the mineral epoch on globe 
A and the man epoch in a very cursory way, 
and so get back to the main problem before us. 
What has been already said facilitates a cursory 
treatment of the intervening evolution. The 
full development of the mineral epoch on globe 
A prepares the way for the vegetable develop- 
ment, and as soon as this begins the mineral 
life impulse overflows into globe B. Then 
when the vegetable development on globe A is 
complete, and the animal development begins, 
the vegetable life impulse overflows to globe B, 
and the mineral impulse passes on to globe C. 
Then, finally, comes the human life impulse on 
globe A. 

Now it is necessary at this point to guard 
against one misconception that might arise. 
As just roughly described, the process might 
convey the idea that by the time the human 
impulse began on globe A the mineral impulse 
was then beginning on globe D, and that be- 
yond lay chaos. This is very far from being 
the case, for two reasons. First, as already 
stated, there are processes of evolution which 
precede the mineral evolution, and thus a wave 
of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution 
precede the mineral wave in its progress round 
the spheres. But over and above this there is 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 91 

a fact to be stated which has such an influence 
on the course of events, that, when it is real- 
ized, it will be seen that the life impulse has 
passed several times completely round the 
whole chain of worlds before the commence- 
ment of the human impulse on globe A. This 
fact is as follows : Each kingdom of evolution, 
vegetable, animal, and so on, is divided into 
several spiral laj^ers. The spiritual monads 
— the individual atoms of that immense life 
impulse of which so much has been said — do 
not fully complete their mineral existence on 
globe A, then complete it on globe B, and so 
on. They pass several times round the whole 
circle as minerals, and then again several times 
round as vegetables, and several times as ani- 
mals. We purposely refrain for the present 
from going into figures, because it is more con- 
venient to state the outline of the scheme in 
general terms first ; but figures in reference to 
these processes of Nature have now been given 
to the world by the occult adepts (for the first 
time we believe in its history), and they shall 
be brought out in the course of this explana- 
tion, very shortly, but as we say the outline is 
enough for any one to think of at first. 

And now we have rudimentary man begin- 
ning his existence on globe A, in that world 
where all things are as the ghosts of the corre- 



92 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

sponding things in this world. He is beginning 
his long descent into matter. And the life im- 
pulse of each " round " overflows, and the races 
of man are established in different degrees of 
perfection on all the planets, on each in turn. 
But the rounds are more complicated in their 
design than this explanation would show, if it 
stopped short here. The process for each spir- 
itual monad is not merely a passage from planet 
to planet. Within the limits of each planet, 
each time it arrives there, it has a complicated 
process of evolution to perform. It is many 
times incarnated in successive races of men be- 
fore it passes onward, and it even has many in- 
carnations in each great race. It will be found 
when we get on further that this fact throws a 
flood of light upon the actual condition of man- 
kind as we know it, accounting for those im- 
mense differences of intellect and morality, and 
even of welfare in its highest sense, which gen- 
erally appear so painfully mysterious. 

That which has a definite beginning gener- 
ally has an end also. As we have shown that 
the evolutionary process under description be- 
gan when certain impulses first commenced 
their operation, so it may be inferred that they 
are tending towards a final consummation, to* 
wards a goal and a conclusion. That is so, 
though the goal is still far off. Man, as we 



THE PLANETARY CHAIN. 93 

know him on this earth, is but half-way through 
the evolutionary process to which he owes his 
present development. He will be as much 
greater before the destiny of our system is ac- 
complished than he is now as he is now greater 
than the missing link. And that improvement 
will even be accomplished on this earth, while, 
in the other worlds of the ascending series, 
there are still loftier peaks of perfection to be 
scaled. It is utterly beyond the range of facul- 
ties, untutored in the discernment of occult 
mysteries, to imagine the kind of life which 
man will thus ultimately lead before the zenith 
of the great cycle is attained. But there is 
enough to be done in filling up the details of 
the outline now presented to the reader, with- 
out attempting to forecast those which have to 
do with existences towards which evolution is 
reaching across the enormous abysses of the 
future. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE WORLD PERIODS. 

A STRIKING illustration of the uniformities 
of Nature is brought out by the first glance at 
the occult doctrine in reference to the develop- 
ment of man on the earth. The outline of the 
design is the same as the outline of the more 
comprehensive design covering the whole chain 
of worlds. The inner details of this world, as 
regards its units of construction, are the same 
as the inner details of the larger organism of 
which this world itself is a unit. That is to 
say, the development of humanity on this earth 
is accomplished by means of successive waves 
of development which correspond to the succes- 
sive worlds in the great planetary chain. The 
great tide of human life, be it remembered — 
for that has been already set forth — sweeps 
round the whole circle of worlds in successive 
waves. These primary growths of humanity 
may be conveniently spoken of as rounds. We 
must not forget that the individual units, con- 
stituting each round in turn, are identically the 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 95 

same as regards their higher principles, that is, 
that the individualities on the earth during 
round one come back again after completing 
their travels round the whole series of worlds 
and constitute round two, and so on. But 
the point to which special attention should be 
drawn here is that the individual unit having 
arrived at any given planet of the series, in the 
course of any given round, does not merely 
touch th?tt planet and pass on to the next. Be- 
fore passing on, he has to live through a series 
of races on that planet. And this fact suggests 
the outline of the fabric which will presently 
develop itself in the reader's mind and exhibit 
that similarity of design on the part of the one 
world as compared with the whole series to 
which attention has already been drawn. As 
the complete scheme of Nature that we belong 
to is worked out by means of a series of rounds 
sweeping through all the worlds, so the devel- 
opment of humanity on each world is worked 
out by a series of races developed within the 
limits of each world in turn. 

It is time now to make the working of this 
law clearer by coming to the actual figures 
which have to do with the evolution of our doc- 
trine. It would have been premature to begin 
with them, but as soon as the idea of a system 
of worlds in a chain, and of life evolution on 



96 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

each through a series of re-births, is satisfac- 
torily grasped, the further examination of the 
laws at work will be greatly facilitated by pre- 
cise reference to the actual number of worlds 
and the actual number of rounds and races re- 
quired to accomplish the whole purpose of the 
system. For the whole duration of the system 
is as certainly limited in time, be it remem- 
bered, as the life of a single man. Probably 
not limited to any definite number of years set 
irrevocably from the commencement, but that 
which has a beginning progresses onward to- 
wards an end. The life of a man, leaving ac- 
cidents quite out of the account, is a termina- 
ble period, and the life of a world system leads 
up to a final consummation. The vast periods 
of time, concerned in the life of a world sys- 
tem, dazzle the imagination as a rule, but still 
they are measurable ; they are divisible into 
sub-periods of various kinds, and these have a 
definite number. 

By what prophetic instinct Shakespeare 
pitched upon seven hs the number which suited 
his fantastic classification of the ages of man 
is a question with which we need not be much 
concerned, but certain it is that lie could not 
have made a more felicitous choice. In periods 
of sevens the evolution of the races of man may 
be traced, and the actual number of the objec 



TEE WORLD PERIODS. 97 

tive worlds which constitute our system, and of 
which the earth is one, is seven also. Remem- 
ber the occult scientists know this as a fact, 
just as the physical scientists know for a fact 
that the spectrum consists of seven colors, and 
the musical scale of seven tones. There are 
seven kingdoms of Nature, not three, as modern 
science has imperfectly classified them. Man 
belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from 
that of the animals, including beings in a 
higher state of organization than that which 
manhood has familiarized us with as yet ; and 
below the mineral kingdom there are three 
others which science in the West knows noth- 
ing about ; but this branch of the subject may 
be set aside for the present. It is mentioned 
merely to show the regular operation of the 
septenary law in Nature. 

Man, returning to the kingdom we are most 
interested in, is evolved in a series of rounds 
(progressions round the series of worlds), and 
seven of these rounds have to be accomplished 
before the destinies of our system are worked 
out. The round which is at present going on 
is the fourth. There are considerations of the 
utmost possible interest connected with precise 
knowledge on these points, because each round 
is, as it were, specially allotted to the predomi- 
nance of one of the seven principles in man, 



98 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

and in the regular order of their upward grada- 
tion. 

An individual unit, arriving on a planet for 
the first time in the course of a round, has tq 
work through seven races on that planet before 
he passes on to the next, and each of those races 
occupies the earth for a long time. Our old- 
fashioned speculations about time and eternity, 
suggested by the misty religious systems of the 
West, have brought on a curious habit of mind 
in connection with problems bearing on the 
actual duration of sucli periods. We can talk 
glibly of eternity, and, going to the other end 
of the scale, we are not shocked by a few thou- 
sand years ; but directly years are numbered 
with precision in groups which lie in interven- 
ing regions of thought, illogical Western theo- 
logians are apt to regard such numbering as 
nonsense. Now, we at present living on this 
earth — the great bulk of humanity, that is to 
say, for there are exceptional cases to be con- 
sidered later — are now going through the fifth 
race of our present fourth round. And yet the 
evolution of that fifth race began about a mill- 
ion of years ago. Will the reader, in consid- 
eration of the fact that the present cosmogony 
does not profess to work with eternity, nerve 
himself to deal with estimates that do concern 
themselves with millions of years, and evei) 
count such millions by considerable numbers? 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 99 

Each race of the seven which go to make 
up a round — i. e. which are evolved on the 
earth in succession during its occupation by 
the great wave of humanity passing round the 
planetary chain — is itself subject to subdivis- 
ion. Were this not the case, the active exist- 
ences of each human unit would be indeed few 
and far between. Within the limits of each 
race there are seven subdivisional races, and 
again within the limits of each subdivision 
there are seven branch races. Through all 
these races, roughly speaking, each individual 
human unit must pass during his stay on earth 
each time he arrives there on a round of prog- 
ress through the planetary system. On reflec- 
tion, this necessity should not appall the mind 
so much as a hypothesis which would provide 
for fewer incarnations. For, however many 
lives each individual unit may pass through 
while on earth during a round, be their num- 
bers few or many, he cannot pass on until the 
time comes for the round wave to sweep for- 
ward. Even by the calculation already fore- 
shadowed, it will be seen that the time spent 
by each individual unit in physical life, can 
only be a small fraction of the whole time he 
has to get through between his arrival on earth 
and his departure for the next planet. The 
larger part of the time — as we reckon dura- 



100 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

tion of time — is obviousty, therefore, spent in 
those subjective conditions of existence which 
belong to the " World of Effects," or spiritual 
earth attached to the physical earth on which 
our objective existence is passed. 

The nature of existence on the spiritual earth 
must be considered pari passu with the nature 
of that passed on the physical earth and dealt 
with in the above enumeration of race incarna- 
tions. We must never forget that between 
each physical existence the individual unit 
passes through a period of existence in the cor- 
responding spiritual world. And it is because 
the conditions of that existence are defined by 
the use that has been made of the opportunities 
in the next preceding physical existence that 
the spiritual earth is often spoken of in occult 
writing as the world of effects. The earth it- 
self is its corresponding world of causes. 

That which passes naturally into the world 
of effects after an incarnation in the world of 
causes is the individual unit or spiritual monad ; 
but the personality just dissolved passes there 
with it, to an extent dependent on the qualifi- 
cations of such personality, — on the use, that is 
to say, which the person in question has made 
of his opportunities in life. The period to be 
spent in the world of effects — enormously 
longer in each case than the life which has 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 101 

paved the way for existence there — corre- 
sponds to the " hereafter " or heaven of ordi- 
nary theology. The narrow purview of ordi- 
nary religious conceptions deals merely with 
one spiritual life and its consequences in the 
life to come. Theology conceives that the en- 
tity concerned had its beginning in this physi- 
cal life, and that the ensuing spiritual life will 
never stop. And this pair of existences, which 
is shown, by the elements of occult science that 
we are now unfolding, to constitute a part only 
of the entity's experience during its connection 
with a branch race, which is one of seven be- 
longing to a subdivisional race, itself one of 
seven belonging to a main race, itself one of 
seven belonging to the occupation of earth by 
one of the seven round waves of humanity 
which have each to occupy it in turn before its 
functions in Nature are concluded, — this mi- 
croscopic molecule of the whole structure is 
what common theology treats as more than the 
whole, for it is supposed to cover eternity. 

The reader must here be warned against one 
conclusion to which the above explanations — 
perfectly accurate as far as they go, but not yet 
covering the whole ground — might lead him. 
He will not get at the exact number of lives an 
individual entity has to lead on the earth in the 
course of its occupation by one round, if he 



102 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

merely raises seven to its third power. If one 
existence only were passed in each branch race, 
the total number would obviously be 343, but 
each life descends at least twice into objectivity 
in the same branch, — each monad, in other 
words, incarnates twice in each branch race. 
Again, there is a curious cyclic law which op- 
erates to augment the total number of incarna- 
tions beyond 686. Each subdivisional race has 
a certain extra vitality at its climax, which 
leads it to throw off an additional offshoot race 
at that point in its progress, and again another 
offshoot race is developed at the end of the sub- 
divisional race by its dying momentum, so to 
speak. Through these races the whole tide of 
human life passes, and the result is that the 
actual normal number of incarnations for each 
monad is not far short of 800. Within rela- 
tively narrow limits it is a variable number, 
but the bearings of that fact may be considered 
later on. 

The methodical law which carries each and 
every individual human entity through the vast 
evolutionary process thus sketched out, is in no 
way incompatible with that liability to fall 
away into abnormal destinies or ultimate anni- 
hilation which menaces the personal entities of 
people who cultivate very ignoble affinities. 
The distribution of the seven principles at 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 103 

death shows that clearly enough, but viewed in 
the light of these further explanations about 
evolution, the situation may be better realized. 
The permanent entity is that which lives 
through the whole series of lives, not only 
through the races belonging to the present 
round wave on earth, but also through those of 
other round waves and other worlds. Broadly 
speaking, it may in due time, though at some 
inconceivably distant future as measured in 
years, recover a recollection of ail those lives, 
which will seem as days in the past to us. But 
the astral dross, cast off at each passage into 
the world of effects, has a more or less depen- 
dent existence of its own, quite separate from 
that of the spiritual entity from which it has 
just been disunited. 

The natural history of this astral remnant is 
a problem of much interest and importance, but 
a methodical continuation of the whole subject 
will require us in the first instance to endeavor 
to realize the destiny of the higher and more du- 
rable spiritual Ego ; and before going into that 
inquiry, there is a good deal more to be said 
about the development of the objective races. 

Esoteric science, though interesting itself 
mainly with matters generally regarded as ap- 
pertaining to religion, would not be the com- 
plete comprehensive and trustworthy system 



104 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

that it is, if it failed to bring all the facts of 
earth life into harmony with its doctrines. It 
would have been little able to search out and 
ascertain the manner in which the human race 
has evolved through seons of time and series of 
planets, if it had not been in a position to ascer- 
tain also, as the smaller inquiry is included in 
the greater, the manner in which the wave of 
humanity with which we are now concerned has 
been developed on this earth. The faculties, in 
short, which enable adepts to read the mys- 
teries of other worlds, and of other states of ex- 
istence, are in no way unequal to the task of 
traveling back along the life-current of this 
globe. It follows that while the brief record 
of a few thousand years is all that our so-called 
universal history can deal with, the earth his- 
tory, which forms a department of esoteric 
knowledge, goes back to the incidents of the 
fourth race which preceded ours, and to those 
of the third race which preceded that. It goes 
back still further indeed, but the second and 
first races did not develop anything that could 
be called civilization, and of them, therefore, 
there is less to be said than of their successors. 
The third and fourth did — strange as it may 
seem to some modern readers to contemplate 
the notion of civilization on the earth several 
millions of years ago. 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 105 

Where are its traces ? they will ask. How 
could the civilization with which Europe has 
now endowed mankind pass away so completely 
that any future inhabitants of the earth could 
ever be ignorant that it once existed ? How 
then can we conceive the idea that any similar 
civilization can have vanished, leaving no rec- 
ords for us ? 

The answer lies in the regular routine of 
planetary life, which goes on pari passu with 
the life of its inhabitants. The periods of the 
great root races are divided from each other by 
great convulsions of Nature and by great geo- 
logical changes. Europe was not in existence 
as a continent at the time the fourth race flour- 
ished. The continent on which the fourth race 
lived was not in existence at the time the third 
race flourished, and neither of the continents 
which were the great vortices of the civilizations 
of those two races are in existence now. Seven 
great continental cataclysms occur during the 
occupation of the earth by the human life- wave 
for one round period. Each race is cut off in 
this way at its appointed time, some survivors 
remaining in parts of the world, not the proper 
home of their race ; but these, invariably in 
such cases, exhibiting a tendency to decay, and 
relapsing into barbarism with more or less 
rapidity. 



106 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

The proper home of the fourth race, which 
directly preceded our own, was that continent 
of which some memory has been preserved even 
in exoteric literature — the lost Atlantis. But 
the great island, the destruction of which is 
spoken of by Plato, was really but the last rem- 
nant of the continent. " In the Eocene age," 
I am told, " even in its very first part, the great 
cycle of the fourth race men, the Atlanteans, 
had already reached its highest point, and the 
great continent, the father of nearly all the 
present continents, showed the first symptoms 
of sinking, — a process that occupied it down 
to 11,446 years ago, when its last island, that, 
translating its vernacular name, we may call 
with propriety Poseidonis, went down with a 
crash. 

"Lemuria" (a former continent stretching 
southward from India across what is now the 
Indian Ocean, but connected with Atlantis, for 
Africa was not then in existence) " should no 
more be confounded with the Atlantis conti- 
nent than Europe with America. Both sank 
and were drowned, with their high civilizations 
and ' gods,' yet between the two catastrophes a 
period of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria 
flourishing and ending her career just about 
that lapse of time before the early part of the 
Eocene age, since its race was the third. Be- 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 107 

hold the relics of that once great nation in some 
of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia." 

It is a mistake on the part of a recent writer 
on Atlantis to people India and Egypt with 
the colonies of that continent, but of that more 
anon. 

" Why should not your geologists," asks my 
revered Mahatma teacher, " bear in mind that 
under the continents explored and fathomed 
by them, in the bowels of which they have 
found the Eocene age, and forced it to de- 
liver to them its secrets, there may be hidden 
deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed 
ocean beds, other and far older continents 
whose strata have never been geologically ex- 
plored ; and that they may some day upset en- 
tirely their present theories. Why not admit 
that our present continents have, like Lemuria 
and Atlantis, been several times already sub- 
merged, and had the time to reappear again, 
and bear their new groups of mankind and civ- 
ilization ; and that at the first great geological 
upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of 
periodical cataclysms that occur from the be- 
ginning to the end of every round, our already 
autopsized continents will go down, and the 
Lemurias and Atlantises come up again. 

" Of course the fourth race had its periods of 
the highest civilization." (The letter from 



108 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

which I am now quoting was written in answer 
to a series of questions I put.) " Greek, and 
Roman, and even Egyptian civilizations are 
nothing compared to the civilizations that be- 
gan with the third race. Those of the second 
race were not savages, but they could not be 
called civilized. 

" Greeks and Romans were small sub-races, 
and Egyptians part and parcel of our own Cau- 
casian stock. Look at the latter, and at India. 
Having reached the highest civilization, and 
what is more, learning, both went down; Egypt, 
as a distinct sub-race, disappearing entirely (her 
Copts are but a hybrid remnant); India, as one 
of the first and most powerful offshoots of the 
mother race, and composed of a number of sub- 
races, lasting to these times, and struggling to 
take once more her place in history some day. 
That history catches but a few stray, hazy 
glimpses of Egypt some 12,000 years back, 
when, having already reached the apex of its 
cycle thousands of years before, the latter had 
begun to go down. 

"The Chaldees were at the apex of their 
occult fame before what you term the Bronze 
Age. We hold — but then what warrant can 
you give the world that we are right? — that 
far greater civilizations than our own have 
risen and decayed. It is not enough to say, as 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 109 

some of your modern writers do, that an extinct 
civilization existed before Rome and Athens 
were founded. We affirm that a series of civ- 
ilizations existed before as well as after the 
glacial period, that they existed upon various 
points of the globe, reached the apex of glory, 
and died. Every trace and memory had been 
lost of the Assyrian and Phoenician civiliza- 
tions, until discoveries began to be made a few 
years ago. And now they open a new though 
not by far one of the earliest pages in the his- 
tory of mankind. And yet how far back do 
those civilizations go in comparison with the 
oldest, and even them histor} 7 is slow to accept. 
Archaeology has sufficiently demonstrated that 
the memory of man runs back vastly further 
than history has been willing to accept, and 
the sacred records of once mighty nations pre- 
served by their heirs are still more worthy of 
trust. We speak of civilizations of the ante- 
glacial period, and not only in the minds of 
the vulgar and the profane, but even in the 
opinion of the highly-learned geologist, the 
claim sounds preposterous. What would you 
say, then, to our affirmation that the Chinese, — 
I now speak of the inland, the true Chinaman, 
not of the hybrid mixture between the fourth 
and fifth races now occupying the throne, — 
the aborigines who belong in their unallied na- 



110 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

tionality wholly to the highest and last branch 
of the fourth race, reached their highest civili- 
zation when the fifth had hardly appeared in 
Asia? When was it? Calculate. The group 
of islands discovered by Nordenskiold, of the 
Vega was found strewn with fossils of horses, 
sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of ele- 
phants, mammoths, rhinoceroses, and other 
monsters belonging to periods when man, says 
your science, had not yet made his appearance 
on earth. How came horses and sheep to be 
found in company with the huge antediluvians? 
" The region now locked in the fetters of 
eternal winter, uninhabited by man, that most 
fragile of animals, will very soon be proved 
to have had not only a tropical climate, some- 
thing your science knows and does not dispute, 
but having been likewise the seat of one of the 
most ancient civilizations of the fourth race, 
whose highest relics we now find in the degener- 
ate Chinaman, and whose lowest are hopelessly 
(for the profane scientist) intermixed with the 
remnants of the third. I told you before that the 
highest people now on earth (spiritually) belong 
to the first sub-race of the fifth root race, and 
those are the Aryan Asiatics ; the highest race 
(physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of 
the fifth, — yourselves, the white conquerors. 
The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh 



THE WORLD PERIODS. Ill 

sub-race of the fourth root race, — the above- 
mentioned Chinamen and their offshoots and 
branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetens, 
Javanese, etc., etc.), — with remnants of other 
sub-races of the fourth and the seventh sub-race 
of the third race. All these fallen, degraded 
semblances of humanity are the direct lineal 
descendants of highly civilized nations, neither 
the names nor memory of which have survived, 
except in such books as 'Populvuh,' the sacred 
book of the Guatemalans, and a few others 
unknown to science. " 

I had inquired was there any way of ac- 
counting for what seems the curious rush of 
human progress within the last two thousand 
years, as compared with the relatively stagnant 
condition of the fourth round people up to the 
beginning of modern progress. This ques- 
tion it was that elicited the explanations quoted 
above, and also the following remarks in regard 
to the recent "rush of human progress." 

" The latter end of a very important cycle. 
Each round, each race, as every sub-race, has 
its great and its smaller cycles on every planet 
that mankind passes through. Our fourth 
round humanity has its one great cycle, and so 
have its races and sub-races. ' The curious 
rush ' is due to the double effect of the former 
^- the beginning of its downward course — and 



112 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

of the latter (the small cycle of your sub-race) 
running on to its apex. Remember you belong 
to the fifth race, yet you are but a Western 
sub-race. Notwithstanding your efforts, what 
you call civilization is confined only to the lat- 
ter and its offshoots in America. Radiating 
around, its deceptive light may seem to throw 
its rays on a greater distance than it does- in 
reality. There is no rush in China, and of 
Japan you make but a caricature. 

" A student of occultism ought not to speak 
of the stagnant condition of the fourth -round 
people, since history knows next to nothing of 
that condition, ' up to the beginning of modern 
progress,' of other nations but the Western. 
What do you know of America, for instance, 
before the invasion of that country by the 
Spaniards ? Less than two centuries prior to 
the arrival of Cortez there was as great a rush 
toward progress among the sub-races of Peru 
and Mexico as there is now in Europe and the 
United States. Their sub-race ended in nearly 
total annihilation through causes generated by 
itself. We may speak only of the ' stagnant ' 
condition into which, following the law of de- 
velopment, growth, maturity, and decline, every 
race and sub-race falls during the transition 
periods. It is that latter condition your uni- 
versal history is acquainted with, while it re* 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 113 

mains superbly ignorant of the condition even 
India was in some ten centuries back. Your 
sub-races are now running toward the apex of 
their respective cycles, and that history goes no 
further back than the periods of decline of a 
few other sub-races belonging most of them to 
the preceding fourth race." 

I had asked to what epoch Atlantis belonged, 
and whether the cataclysm by which it was 
destroyed came in an appointed place in the 
progress of evolution, corresponding for the de- 
velopment of races to the obscuration of plan- 
ets. The answer was : — 

" To the Miocene times. Everything comes 
in its appointed time and place in the evolution 
of rounds, otherwise it would be impossible for 
the best seer to calculate the exact hour and 
year when such cataclysms great and small 
have to occur. All an adept could do would 
be to predict an approximate time, whereas 
now events that result in great geological 
changes may be predicted with as mathemat- 
ical a certainty as eclipses and other revolu- 
tions in space. The sinking of Atlantis (the 
group of continents and isles) began during the 
Miocene period, — as certain of your continents 
are now observed to be gradually sinking, — 
and it culminated first in the final disappear- 
ance of the largest continent, an event coinci- 



114 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

dent with the elevation of the Alps ; and second, 
with that of the last of the fair islands men- 
tioned by Plato. The Egyptian priests of Sais 
told his ancestor Solon, that Atlantis (i. e., the 
only remaining large island) had perished nine 
thousand years before their time. This was not 
a fancy date, since they had for millenniums 
preserved most carefully their records. But 
then, as I say, they spoke but of the Poseidonis, 
and would not reveal even to the great Greek 
legislator their secret chronology. As there 
are no geological reasons for doubting, but, on 
the contrary, a mass of evidence for accepting 
the tradition, science has finally accepted the 
existence of the great continent and archipel- 
ago, and thus vindicated the truth of one more 
< fable.' 

" The approach of every new obscuration is 
always signaled by cataclysms of either fire or 
water. But apart from this, every root race 
has to be cut in two, so to say, by either one 
or the other. Thus having reached the apex 
of its development and glory, the fourth race 
— the Atlanteans — were destroyed by water ; 
you find now but their degenerate fallen rem- 
nants, whose sub-races nevertheless, each of 
them, had its palmy days of glory and relative 
greatness. What they are now, you will be 
some day, the law of cycles being one and im- 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 115 

mutable. When your race, the fifth, will have 
reached its zenith of physical intellectuality, 
and developed its highest civilization (remem- 
ber the difference we make between material 
and spiritual civilizations), unable to go any 
higher in its own cycle, its progress toward 
absolute evil will be arrested (as its predeces- 
sors, the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, the 
men of the third and fourth races, were arrested 
in their progress toward the same) by one of 
such cataclysmic changes, its great civilization 
destroyed, and all the sub-races of that race 
will be found going down their respective 
cycles, after a short period of glory and learn- 
ing. See the remnants of the Atlanteans, the 
old Greeks and Romans (the modern belong to 
the fifth race). See how great and how short, 
how evanescent were their days of fame and 
glory. For they were but sub-races of the seven 
offshoots of the root race. 1 No mother race, 
any more than her sub-races and offshoots, is 
allowed by the one reigning law to trespass 
upon the prerogatives of the race, or sub-race 
that will follow it ; least of all to encroach 
upon the knowledge and powers in store for its 
successor." 
The "progress toward absolute evil," arrested 

1 Branches of the subdivisions, according to vhe nomenclature I 
bave adopted previously, 



116 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

by the cataclysms of each race in turn, sets 
in with the acquisition, by means of ordinary 
intellectual research and scientific advance- 
ment, of those powers over Nature which ac- 
crue even now in adeptship from the premature 
development of higher faculties than those we 
ordinarily employ. I have spoken slightly of 
these powers in a preceding chapter, when en- 
deavoring to describe our esoteric teachers ; to 
describe them minutely would lead me into a 
long digression on occult phenomena. It is 
enough to say that they are such as cannot but 
be dangerous to society generally, and provo- 
cative of all manner of crimes which would 
utterly defy detection, if possessed by persons 
capable of regarding them as anything else but 
a profoundly sacred trust. Now some of these 
powers are simply the practical application of 
obscure forces of Nature, susceptible of dis- 
covery in the course of ordinary scientific prog- 
ress. Such progress had been accomplished 
by the Atlanteans. The worldly men of sci- 
ence in that race had learned the secrets of 
the disintegration and reintegration of matter, 
which few but practical spiritualists as yet 
know to be possible, and of control over the 
elementals, by means of which that and other 
even more portentous phenomena can be pro- 
duced. Such powers in the hands of persons 



TEE WORLD PERIODS. 117 

willing to use them for merely selfish and un- 
scrupulous ends, must not only be productive of 
social disaster, but also for the persons who hold 
them, of progress in the direction of that evilly- 
spiritual exaltation, which is a far more terri- 
ble result than suffering and inconvenience in 
this world. Thus it is, when physical intellect, 
unguarded by elevated morality, runs over into 
the proper region of spiritual advancement, that 
the natural law provides for its violent repres- 
sion. The contingency will be better under- 
stood when we come to deal with the general 
destinies toward which humanity is tending. 

The principle under which the various races 
of man as they develop are controlled collec- 
tively by the cyclic law, however they may in- 
dividually exercise the free will they unques- 
tionably possess, is thus very plainly asserted. 
For people who have never regarded human 
affairs as covering more than the very short 
period with which history deals, the course of 
events will perhaps, as a rule, exhibit no cyclic 
character, but rather a checkered progress, has- 
tened sometimes by great men and fortunate 
circumstances, sometimes retarded by war, big- 
otry, or intervals of intellectual sterility, but 
moving continually onward in the long ac- 
count at one rate of speed or another. As the 
esoteric view of the matter, fortified by the 



118 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

wide range of observation which occult science 
is enabled to take, has an altogether opposite 
tendency, it seems worth while to conclude 
these explanations with an extract from a dis- 
tinguished author, quite unconnected with the 
occult world, who nevertheless, from a close 
observation of the mere historical record, pro- 
nounces himself decisively in favor of the theory 
of cycles. In his u History of the Intellectual 
Development of Europe," Dr. J. W. Draper 
writes as follows : — 

" We are, as we often say, the creatures of 
circumstances. In that expression there is a 
higher philosophy than might at first sight ap- 
pear. . . . From this more accurate point of 
view we should therefore consider the course 
of these events, recognizing the principle that 
the affairs of men pass forward in a determi- 
nate way, expanding and unfolding themselves. 
And hence we see that the things of which we 
have spoken as though they were matters of 
choice, were in reality forced upon their appar- 
ent authors by the necessity of the times. But 
in truth they should be considered as the pres- 
entation of a certain phase of life which nations 
in their onward course sooner or later assume. 
To the individual, how well we know that a 
sober moderation of action, an appropriate grav. 
ity of demeanor, belong to the mature period 



THE WORLD PERIODS. 119 

of life, change from the wanton willfulness of 
youth, which may be ushered in, or its begin- 
ning marked by many accidental incidents ; in 
one perhaps by domestic bereavements, in an- 
other by the loss of fortune, in a third by ill 
health. We are correct enough in imputing to 
such trials the change of chnracter ; but we 
never deceive ourselves by supposing that it 
would have failed to take place had those in- 
cidents not occurred. There runs an irresisti- 
ble destiny in the midst of all these vicissitudes. 
. . . There are analogies between the life of a 
nation and that of an individual, who, though 
he may be in one respect the maker of his own 
fortunes, for happiness or for misery, for good 
or for evil, though he remains here or goes 
there as his inclinations prompt, though he 
does this or abstains from that as he chooses, is 
nevertheless held fast by an inexorable fate, — 
a fate which brought him into the world in- 
voluntarily, as far as he was concerned, which 
presses him forward through a definite career, 
the stages of which are absolutely invariable,— 
infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age, 
with all their characteristic actions and pas- 
sions, — and which removes him from the scene 
at the appointed time, in most cases against his 
will. So also it is with nations ; the voluntary 
is only the outward semblance, covering but 



120 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

hardly hiding the predetermined. Over the 
events of life we may have control, but none 
whatever over the law of its progress. There 
is a geometry that applies to nations an equa- 
tion of their curve of advance. That no mortal 
man can touch." 



CHAPTER V. 

DEVACHAN. 

It was not possible to approach a considera- 
tion of the states into which the higher human 
principles pass at death, without first indicat- 
ing the general framework of the whole design 
worked out in the course of the evolution of 
man. That much of my task, however, having 
now been accomplished, we may pass on to con- 
sider the natural destinies of each human Ego, 
in the interval which elapses between the close 
of one objective life and the commencement of 
another. At the commencement of another, 
the Karma of the previous objective life deter- 
mines the state of life into which the individ- 
ual shall be born. This doctrine of Karma is 
one of the most interesting features of Buddhist 
philosophy. There has been no secret about it 
at any time, though for want of a proper com- 
prehension of elements in the philosophy which 
have been strictly esoteric, it may sometimes 
have been misunderstood. 

Karma is a collective expression applied to 



122 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

that complicated group of affinities for good and 
evil generated by a human being during life, 
and the character of which inheres in the mole- 
cules of his fifth principle all through the inter- 
val which elapses between his death from one 
objective life and his birth into the next. As 
stated sometimes, the doctrine seems to be one 
which exacts the notion of a superior spiritual 
authority summing up the acts of a man's life 
at its close, taking into consideration his good 
deeds and his bad, and giving judgment about 
him on the whole aspect of the case. But a 
comprehension of the way in which the human 
principles divide up at death, will afford a 
clue to the comprehension of the way in which 
Karma operates, and also of the great subject 
we may better take up first, the immediate 
spiritual condition of man after death. 

At death, the three lower principles — the 
body, its mere physical vitality, and its astral 
counterpart — are finally abandoned by that 
which really is the Man himself, and the four 
higher principles escape into that world imme- 
diately above our own ; above our own, that is, 
in the order of spirituality; not above it at all, 
but in it and of it, as regards real locality, — the 
astral plane, or Karma Loca, according to a very 
familiar Sanskrit expression. Here a division 
takes plaoe between the two duads, which the 



DEVACHAN. 123 

four higher principles include. The explana- 
tions already given concerning the imperfect 
extent to which the upper principles of man are 
as yet developed, will show that this estimation 
of the process, as in the nature of a mechanical 
separation of the principles, is a rough way of 
dealing with the matter. It must be modified 
in the reader's mind by the light of what has 
been already said. It may be otherwise de- 
scribed as a trial of the extent to which the 
fifth principle has been developed. Regarded 
in the light of the former idea, however, we 
must conceive the sixth and seventh principles, 
on the one hand, drawing the fifth, the human 
soul, in one direction, while the fourth draws it 
back earthward in the other. Now, the fifth 
principle is a very complex entity, separable 
itself into superior and inferior elements. In 
the struggle which takes place between its late 
companion principles, its best, purest, most ele- 
vated, and spiritual portions cling to the sixth, 
its lower instincts, impulses, and recollections 
adhere to the fourth, and it is in a measure torn 
asunder. The lower remnant, associating itself 
with the fourth, floats off in the earth's atmos- 
phere, while the best elements, those, be it un- 
derstood, which really constitute the Ego of the 
late earthly personality, the individuality, the 
consciousness thereof, follows the sixth and sev- 



124 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

enth into a spiritual condition, the nature of 
which we are about to examine. 

Rejecting the popular English name for this 
spiritual condition, as incrusted with too many 
misconceptions to be convenient, let us keep to 
the Oriental designation of that region or state 
into which the higher principles of human crea- 
tures pass at death. This is additionally desir- 
able because, although the Devachan of Bud- 
dhist philosophy corresponds in some respects 
to the modern European idea of heaven, it dif- 
fers from heaven in others which are even more 
important. 

Firstly, however, in Devachan, that which 
survives is not merely the individual monad, 
which survives through all the changes of the 
whole evolutionary scheme, and flits from body 
to body, from planet to planet, and so forth, — 
that which survives in Devachan is the man's 
own self-conscious personality, under some re- 
strictions indeed, which we will come to direct- 
ly, but still it is the same personality as regards 
its higher feelings, aspirations, affections, and 
even tastes, as it was on earth. Perhaps it 
would be better to say the essence of the late 
self-conscious personality. 

It may be worth the reader's while to learn 
what Colonel H. S. Olcott has to say in his 
" Buddhist Catechism " (14th thousand) of the 



DEVACHAN. 125 

intrinsic difference between " individuality " 
and " personality." Since he wrote not only 
under the approval of the High Priest of the 
Sripada and Galle, Sumangala, but also under 
the direct instruction of his adept Guru, his 
words will have weight for the student of Oc- 
cultism. This is what he says in his Appen- 
dix : — 

" Upon reflection, I have substituted ' person- 
ality ' for 4 individuality ' as written in the first 
edition. The successive appearances upon one 
or many earths, or ' descents into generation ' 
of the tanhaically-coherent parts (Skandhas) of 
a certain being, are a succession of personali- 
ties. In each birth the personality differs from 
that of the previous or next succeeding birth. 
Karma, the deus ex mdchina, masks (or shall 
we say, reflects ?) itself now in the personality 
of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on 
throughout the string of births. But though 
personalities ever shift, the one line of life 
along which they are strung like beads, runs 
unbroken. 

" It is ever that particular line, never any 
other. It is therefore individual, an individual 
vital undulation which began in Nirvana or the 
subjective side of Nature, as the light or heat 
undulation through ether began at its dynamic 
source ; is careering through the objective side 



126 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

of Nature, under the impulse of Karma and the 
creative direction of Tanha ; and tends through 
many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr. 
Rhys Davids calls that which passes from per- 
sonality to personality along the individual 
chain, ' character ' or 4 doing.' Since ' charac- 
ter' is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, JDut 
the sum of one's mental qualities and moral 
propensities, would it not help to dispel what 
Mr. Rhys Davids calls ' the desperate expe- 
dient of a mystery,' if we regarded the life un- 
dulation as individuality, and each of its series 
of natal manifestations as a separate person- 
ality ? 

" The denial of 4 soul ' by Buddha (see 4 San- 
yutto Nikaya,' the Sutta Pitaka) points to the 
prevalent delusive belief in an independent 
transmissible personality ; an entity that could 
move from birth to birth unchanged, or go to a 
place or state where, as such perfect entity, it 
could eternally enjoy or suffer. And what he 
shows is that the ' I am I ' consciousness is, as 
regards permanency, logically impossible, since 
its elementary constituents constantly change, 
and the ' I ' of one birth differs from the 4 1 ' of 
every other birth. But everything that I have 
found in Buddhism accords with the theory of 
a gradual evolution of the perfect man, viz., a 
Buddha through numberless natal experiences. 



DEVACHAN. 127 

And in the consciousness of that person who at 
the end of a given chain of beings attains 
Buddhahood, or who succeeds in attaining the 
fourth stage of Dhyana, or mystic self-develop- 
ment, in any one of his births anterior to the 
final one, the scenes of all these serial births 
are perceptible. In the ' Jatakattahavannana,' 
so well translated by Mr. Rhys Davids, an ex- 
pression continually recurs which I think rather 
supports such an* idea, viz., ' Then the blessed 
one made manifest an occurrence hidden by 
change of birth? or 'that which had been hid- 
den by, etc' Early Buddhism, then, clearly 
held to a permanency of records in the Akasa, 
and the potential capacity of man to read the 
same when he has evoluted to the stage of true 
individual enlightenment." 

The purely sensual feelings and tastes of the 
late personality will drop off from it in Deva- 
chan, but it does not follow that nothing is 
preservable in that state, except feelings and 
thoughts having a direct reference to religion 
or spiritual philosophy. On the contrary, all 
the superior phases, even of sensuous emotion, 
find their appropriate sphere of development in 
Devachan. To suggest a whole range of ideas 
by means of one illustration, a soul in Deva- 
chan, if the soul of a man who was passionately 
devoted to music, would be continuously en- 



128 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

raptured by the sensations music produces. 
The person whose happiness of the higher sort 
on earth had been entirely centred in the ex- 
ercise of the affections will miss none in Deva- 
chan of those whom he or she loved. But, at 
once it will be asked, if some of these are not 
themselves fit for Devachan, how then ? The 
answer is, that does not matter. For the per- 
son who loved them they will be there. It is 
not necessary to say much more to give a clue 
to the position. Devachan is a subjective state. 
It will seem as real as tbe chairs and tables 
round us ; and remember that, above all things, 
to the profound philosophy of Occultism, are 
the chairs and tables, and the whole objective 
scenery of the world, unreal and merely transi- 
tory delusions of sense. As real as the realities 
of this world to us, and even more so, will be 
the realities of Devachan to those who go into 
that state. 

From this it ensues that the subjective isola- 
tion of Devachan, as it will perhaps be con- 
ceived at first, is not real isolation at all, as the 
word is understood on the physical plane of ex- 
istence ; it is companionship with all that the 
true soul craves for, whether persons, things, or 
knowledge. And a patient consideration of 
the place in Nature which Devachan occupies 
will show that this subjective isolation of each 



DEVACHAN. 129 

human unit is the only condition which renders 
possible anything which can be described as a 
felicitous spiritual existence after death for 
mankind at large, and Devachan is as much a 
purely and absolutely felicitous condition for 
all who attain it, as Avitchi is the reverse of it. 
There is no inequality or injustice in the sys- 
tem ; Devachan is by no means the same thing 
for the good and the indifferent alike, but it is 
not a life of responsibility, and therefore there 
is no logical place in it for suffering any more 
than in Avitchi there is any room for enjoy- 
ment or repentance. It is a life of effects, not 
of causes ; a life of being paid your earnings, 
not of laboring for them. Therefore it is im- 
possible to be during that life cognizant of 
what is going on on earth. Under the opera- 
tion of such cognition there would be no true 
happiness possible in the state after death. A 
heaven which constituted a watch-tower from 
which the occupants could still survey the mis- 
eries of the earth, would really be a place of 
acute mental suffering for its most sympathetic, 
unselfish, and meritorious inhabitants. If we 
invest them in imagination with such a very 
limited range of sympathy that they could be 
imagined as not caring about the spectacle of 
suffering after the few persons to whom they 
were immediately attached had died and joined 



130 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

them, still they would have a very unhappy pe- 
riod of waiting to go through before survivors 
reached the end of an often long and toilsome 
existence below. And even this hypothesis 
would be further vitiated by making heaven 
most painful for occupants who were most un- 
selfish and sympathetic, whose reflected distress 
would thus continue on behalf of the afflicted 
race of mankind generally, even after their per- 
sonal kindred had been rescued by the lapse of 
time. The only escape from this dilemma lies 
in the supposition that heaven is not yet opened 
for business, so to speak, and that all people 
who have ever lived, from Adam downward, 
are still lying in a death-like trance, waiting for 
the resurrection at the end of the world. This 
hypothesis also has its embarrassments, but we 
are concerned at present„with the scientific har- 
mony of esoteric Buddhism, not with the theo- 
ries of other creeds. 

Readers, however, who may grant that a pur- 
view of earthly life from heaven would render 
happiness in heaven impossible, may still doubt 
whether true happiness is possible in the state, 
as it may be objected, of monotonous isolation 
now described. The objection is merely raised 
from the point of view of an imagination that 
cannot escape from its present surroundings. 
To begin with, about monotony. No one will 



DEVACHAN. 131 

complain of having experienced monotony dur- 
ing the minute, or moment, or half hour, as it 
may have been, of the greatest happiness he 
may have enjoyed in life. Most people have 
had some happy moments, at all events, to look 
back to for the purpose of this comparison ; and 
let us take even one such minute or moment, 
too short to be open to the least suspicion of 
monotony, and imagine its sensations immensely 
prolonged without any external events in prog- 
ress to mark the lapse of time. There is no 
room, in such a condition of things, for the con- 
ception of weariness. The unalloyed, unchange- 
able sensation of intense happiness goes on and 
on, not forever, because the causes which have 
produced it are not infinite themselves, but for 
very long periods of time, until the efficient im- 
pulse has exhausted itself. 

Nor must it be supposed that there is, so to 
speak, no change of occupation for souls in De- 
vachan, — that any one moment of earthly sen- 
sation is selected for exclusive perpetuation. 
As a teacher of the highest authority on this 
subject writes : — 

"There are two fields of causal manifesta- 
tions, the objective and subjective. The grosser 
energies — those which operate in the denser 
condition of matter — manifest objectively in 
the next physical life, their outcome being the 



132 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

new personality of each birth marshaling within 
the grand cycle of the e vol u ting individuality. 
It is but the moral and spiritual activities that 
find their sphere of effects in Devachan. And, 
thought and fancy being limitless, how can it 
be argued for one moment that there is an 3*- 
thing like monotony in the state of Devachan ? 
Few are the men whose lives were so utterly 
destitute of feeling, love, or of a more or less 
intense predilection for some one line of 
thought as to be made unfit for a proportionate 
period of Devachanic experience beyond their 
earthly life. So, for instance, while the vices, 
physical and sensual attractions, say, of a great 
philosopher, but a bad friend and a selfish man, 
may result in the birth of a new and still 
greater intellect, but at the same time a most 
miserable man, reaping the Karmic effects of 
all the causes produced Ivy the ' old' being, and 
whose make-up was inevitable from the pre- 
ponderating proclivities of that being in the 
preceding birth, the intermedial period between 
the two physical births cannot be, in Nature's 
exquisitely well-adjusted laws, but a hiatus of 
unconsciousness. There can be no such dreary 
blank as kindly promised, or rather implied, by 
Christian Protestant theology, to the ' departed 
souls,' which, between death and 'resurrection,' 
have to hang on in space, in mental catalepsy 



DEVACRAN. 133 

awaiting the 4 Day of Judgment.' Causes pro- 
duced by mental and spiritual energy being far 
greater and more important than those that 
are created by physical impulses, their effects 
have to be, for weal or woe, proportionately as 
great. Lives on this earth, or other earths, 
affording no proper field for such effects, and 
every laborer being entitled to his own harvest, 
they have to expand in either Devachan or 
Avitchi. 1 Bacon, for instance, whom a poet 
called 

4 The brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind, 1 

might reappear in his next incarnation as a 
greedy money-getter, with extraordinary intel- 
lectual capacities. But, however great the lat- 
ter, they would find no proper field in which 
that particular line of thought, pursued during 
his previous lifetime by the founder of modern 
philosophy, could reap all its dues. It would 
be but the astute lawyer, the corrupt Attorney- 
General, the ungrateful friend, and the dishon- 
est Lord Chancellor, who might find, led on by 
his Karma, a congenial new soil in the body of 
the money-lender, and reappear as a new Shy- 
lock. But where would Bacon, the incompar- 
able thinker, with whom philosophical inquiry 
upon the most profound problems of Nature 
was his ' first and last and only love,' where 

1 The lowest states of Devachan interchain with those of Avitchi 



134 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

would this ' intellectual giant of his race once 
disrobed of his lower nature, go to ? Have all 
the effects of that magnificent intellect to vanish 
and disappear? Certainly not. Thus his moral 
and spiritual qualities would also have to find a 
field in which their energies could expand them- 
selves. Devachan is such a field. Hence, all 
the great plans of moral reform, of intellectual 
research into abstract principles of Nature — 
all the divine, spiritual aspirations that had so 
filled the brightest part of his life would, in 
Devachan, come to fruition ; and the abstract 
entity, known in the preceding birth as Francis 
Bacon, and that may be known in its subse- 
quent re-incarnation as a despised usurer — that 
Bacon's own creation, his Frankenstein, the son 
of his Karma — shall in the meanwhile occupy 
itself in this inner world, also of its own prepa- 
ration, in enjoying the effects of the grand 
beneficial spiritual causes sown in life. It 
would live a purely and spiritually conscious ex- 
istence — a dream of realistic vividness — until 
Karma, being satisfied in that direction, and the 
ripple of force reaching the edge of its sub-cy- 
clic basin, the being should move into its next 
area of causes, either in this same world or an- 
other, according to his stage of progression. 
. . . Therefore, there is ' a change of occupation,' 
a continual change, in Devachan. For that 



DE VAC HAN. 135 

dream-life is but the fruition, the harvest-time, 
of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the 
tree of physical existence in our moments of 
dream and. hope — fancy-glimpses of bliss and 
happiness, stifled in an ungrateful social soil, 
blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and 
ripening under its ever -fructifying sky. If 
man had but one single moment of ideal expe- 
rience, not even then could it be, as errone- 
ously supposed, the indefinite prolongation of 
that 'single moment.' That one note, struck 
from the lyre of life, would form the key-note 
of the being's subjective state, and work out 
into numberless harmonic tones and semitones 
of psychic phantasmagoria. There, all unreal- 
ized hopes, aspirations, dreams, become fully 
realized, and the dreams of the objective be- 
come the realities of the subjective existence. 
And there, behind the curtain of Maya, its va- 
porous and deceptive appearances are perceived 
by the Initiate, who has learned the great secret 
how to penetrate thus deep into the Arcana of 
Being." . . . 

As physical existence has its cumulative in- 
tensity from infancy to prime, and its dimin- 
ishing energy thenceforward to dotage and 
death, so the dream-life of Devachan is lived 
correspondentially. There is the first flutter of 
psychic life, the attainment of prime, the grad- 



136 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ual exhaustion of force passing into conscious 
lethargy, semi-unconsciousness, oblivion and — 
not death but birth ! birth into another person- 
ality and the resumption of action which daily 
begets new congeries of causes that must be 
worked out in another term of Devachan. 

" It is not a reality then, it is a mere dream," 
objectors will urge ; " the soul so bathed in a 
delusive sensation of enjoyment which has no 
reality all the while is being cheated by Na- 
ture, and must encounter a terrible shock when 
it wakes to its mistake." But, in the nature of 
things, it never does or can wake. The waking 
from Devachan is its next birth into objective 
life, and the draught of Lethe has then been 
taken. Nor as regards the isolation of each soul 
is there any consciousness of isolation whatever; 
nor is there ever possibly a parting from its 
chosen associates. Those associates are not in 
the nature of companions who may wish to go 
away, of friends who may tire of the friend that 
loves them, even if he or she does not tire of 
them. Love, the creating force, has placed 
their living image before the personal soul 
which craves for their presence, and that image 
will never fly away. 

On this aspect of the subject I may again 
avail myself of the language of my teacher : — 

" Objectors of that kind will be simply postu 



DEVACHAN. 137 

lating an incongruity, an intercourse of entities 
in Devachan, which applies only to the mutual 
relationship of physical existence ! Two sym- 
pathetic souls, both disembodied, will each 
work out its own Devachanic sensations, mak- 
ing the other a sharer in its subjective bliss. 
This will be as real to them, naturally, as 
though both were yet on this earth. Neverthe- 
less, each is dissociated from the other as re- 
gardo personal or corporeal association. While 
the latter is the only one of its kind that is 
recognized by our earth experience as an actual 
intercourse, for the Devachanee it would be not 
only something unreal, but could have no exist- 
ence for it in any sense, not even as a delusion : 
a physical body or even a Mayavi-rnpa remain- 
ing to its spiritual senses as invisible as it is it- 
self to the physical senses of those who loved it 
best on earth. Thus even though one of the 
'sharers ' were alive and utterly unconscious of 
that intercourse in his waking state, still every 
dealing with him would be to the Devachanee 
an absolute reality. And what actual compan- 
ionship could there ever be other than the purely 
idealistic one as above described, between two 
subjective entities which are not even as mate- 
rial as that ethereal body-shadow — the Mayavi- 
rupa? To object to this on the ground that 
one is thus i cheated by Nature ' and to call it 



138 ESOTERfC BUDDHISM. 

* a delusive sensation of enjoyment which has 
no reality,' is to show one's self utterly unfit 
to comprehend the conditions of life and being 
outside of our material existence. For how can 
the same distinction be made in Devachan — 
i. e., outside of the conditions of earth-life — be- 
tween what we call a reality, and a factitious 
or an artificial counterfeit of the same, in this, 
our world? The same principle cannot apply 
to the two sets of conditions. Is it conceivable 
that what we call a reality in our embodied phys- 
ical state will exist under the same conditions 
as an actuality^ for a disembodied entity? On 
earth, man is dual — in the sense of being a 
thing of matter and a thing of spirit ; hence the 
natural distinction made by his mind — the an- 
alyst of his physical sensations and spiritual 
perceptions — between an actuality and a fic- 
tion ; though, even in this life, the two groups 
of faculties are constantly equilibrating each 
other, each group when dominant seeing as fic- 
tion or delusion what the other believes to be 
most real. But in Devachan our Ego has 
ceased to be dualistic, in the above sense, and 
becomes a spiritual, mental entity. That which 
was a fiction, a dream in life, and which had 
fts being but in the region of ' fancy,' becomes, 
under the new conditions of existence, the only 
possible reality. Thus, for us, to postulate the 



DEVACHAN. 139 

possibility of any other reality for a Devacbanee 
is to maintain an absurdity, a monstrous fallacy, 
an idea unpbilosophical to the last degree. 
The actual is that which is acted or performed 
de facto : 'the reality of a thing is proved by 
its actuality.' And the supposititious and artifi- 
cial having no possible existence in that De- 
vachanic state, the logical sequence is that 
everything in it is actual and real. For, again, 
whether overshadowing the five principles dur- 
ing the life of the personality, or entirely sepa- 
rated from the grosser principles by the dissolu- 
tion of the body — the sixth principle, or our 
'Spiritual Soul,' has no substance — it is ever 
Arupa ; nor is it confined to one place with a 
limited horizon of perceptions around it. There- 
fore, whether in or out of its mortal body, it is 
ever distinct, and free from its limitations ; and 
if we call its Devachanic experiences ' a cheat- 
ing of Nature,' then we should never be allowed 
to call ' reality ' any of those purely abstract feel- 
ings that belong entirely to, and are reflected 
and assimilated by, our higher soul — such, for 
instance, as an ideal perception of the beautiful, 
profound philanthropy, love, etc., as well as 
ever) 7 other purely spiritual sensation that dur- 
ing life fills our inner being with either im- 
mense joy or pain." 

We must remember that by the very nature 



140 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

of the system described there are infinite va- 
rieties of well-being in Devachan, suited to the 
infinite varieties of merit in mankind. If " the 
next world " really were the objective heaven 
which ordinary theology preaches, there would 
be endless injustice and inaccuracy in its oper- 
ation. People, to begin with, would be either 
admitted or excluded, and the differences of 
favor shown to different guests within the all- 
favored region would not sufficiently provide 
for differences of merit in this life. But the 
real heaven of our earth adjusts itself to the 
needs and merits of each new arrival with un- 
failing certainty. Not merely as regards the 
duration of the blissful state, which is deter- 
mined by the causes engendered during objec- 
tive life, but as regards the intensity and 
amplitude of the emotions which constitute 
that blissful state, the heaven of each person 
who attains the really existent heaven is pre- 
cisely fitted to his capacity for enjoying it. It 
is the creation of his own aspirations and facul- 
ties. More than this it may be impossible for 
the uninitiated comprehension to realize. But 
this indication of its character is enough to 
show how perfectly it falls into its appointed 
place in the whole scheme of evolution. 

" Devachan," to resume my direct quota- 
tions, " is, of course, a state, not a locality, as 



DEVACHAN. 141 

much as Avitchi, its antithesis (which please 
not to confound with hell). Esoteric Buddhist 
philosophy has three principal lokas so-called 
— namely, 1, Kama loka ; 2, Rupa loka ; and 
3, Arupa loka ; or in their literal translation 
and meaning — 1, world of desires or passions, 
of unsatisfied earthly cravings — the abode of 
4 Shells ' and Victims, of Elementaries and 
Suicides ; 2, the world of Forms — i. e., of 
shadows more spiritual, having form and objec- 
tivity, but no substance ; and 3, the formless 
world, or rather the world of no form, the in- 
corporeal, since its denizens can have neither 
body, shape, nor color for us mortals, and in the 
sense that we give to these terms. These are 
the three spheres of ascending spirituality, in 
which the several groups of subjective and semi- 
subjective entities find their attractions. All 
but the suicides and the victims of premature 
violent deaths go, according to their attractions 
and powers, either into the Devachanic or the 
Avitchi state, which two states form the num- 
berless subdivisions of Rupa and Arupa lokas 
• — that is to say, that such states not only vary 
in degree, or in their presentation to the sub- 
ject entity as regards form, color, etc., but that 
there is an infinite scale of such states, in their 
progressive spirituality and intensity of feeling; 
from the lowest in the Rupa, up to the highest 



142 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

and the most exalted in the Arupa-loka. The 
student must bear in mind that personality is 
the synonym for limitation ; and that the more 
selfish, the more contracted the person's ideas, 
the closer will he cling to the lower spheres of 
being, the longer loiter on the plane of selfish 
social intercourse." 

Devachan being a condition of mere subjec- 
tive enjoyment, the duration and intensity of 
which is determined by the merit and spiritual- 
ity of the earth-life last past, there is no oppor- 
tunity, while the soul inhabits it, for the punc- 
tual requital of evil deeds. But Nature does 
not content herself with either forgiving sins in 
a free and easy way, or damning sinners out- 
right, like a lazy master too indolent, rather 
than too good-natured, to govern his household 
justly. The Karma of evil, be it great or 
small, is as certainty operative at the appointed 
time as the Karma of good. But the place of 
its operation is not Devachan, but either a new 
re-birth or Avitchi — a state to be reached only 
in exceptional cases and by exceptional natures. 
In other words, while the commonplace sinner 
will reap the fruits of his evil deeds in a follow- 
ing re-incarnation, the exceptional criminal, the 
aristocrat of sin, has Avitchi in prospect — that 
is to say, the condition of subjective spiritual 
misery which is the reverse side of Devachan. 



DEVACHAN. 143 

" Avitchi is a state of the most ideal spirit- 
ual wickedness, something akin to the state of 
Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not 
many, though, are there who can reach it, as 
the thoughtful reader will perceive. And if it 
is urged that since there is Devachan for nearly 
all, for the good, the bad, and the indiffer- 
ent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium are 
frustrated and the law of retribution and of 
impartial, implacable justice, hardly met and 
satisfied by such a comparative scarcity if not 
absence of its antithesis, then the answer will 
show that it is not so. 4 Evil is the dark 
son of Earth (matter) and Good — the fair 
daughter of Heaven ' (or Spirit) says the 
Chinese philosopher ; hence the place of pun- 
ishment for most of our sins is the earth — its 
birth-place and play-ground. There is more 
apparent and relative than actual evil even on 
earth, and it is not given to the hoi polloi to 
reach the fatal grandeur and eminence of a 
4 Satan ' every day." 

Generally, the re-birth into objective exist- 
ence is the event for which the Karma of evil 
patiently waits, and then it irresistibly asserts 
itself ; not that the Karma of good exhausts 
itself in Devachan, leaving the unhappy monad 
to develop a new consciousness with no mate- 
rial beyond the evil deeds of its last personality, 



144 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

The re-birth will be qualified by the merit as 
well as the demerit of the previous life, but the 
Devachan existence is a rosy sleep — a peace- 
ful night with dreams more vivid than day, and 
imperishable for many centuries. 

It will be seen that the Devachan state , is 
only one of the conditions of existence which go 
to make up the whole spiritual or relatively spir- 
itual complement of our earth life. Observers of 
spiritualistic phenomena would never have been 
perplexed as they have been if there were no 
other but the Devachan state to be dealt with. 
For once in Devachan there is very little op- 
portunity for communication between a spirit, 
then wholly absorbed in its own sensations and 
practically oblivious of the earth left behind, 
and its former friends still living. Whether 
gone before or yet remaining on earth, those 
friends, if the bond of affection has been suffi- 
ciently strong, will be with the happy spirit 
still to all intents and purposes for him, and as 
happy, blissful, innocent, as the disembodied 
dreamer himself. It is possible, however, for 
yet living persons to have visions of Devachan, 
though such visions are rare, and only one- 
sided, the entities in Devachan, sighted by the 
earthly clairvoyant, being quite unconscious 
themselves of undergoing such observation. 
The spirit of the clairvoyant ascends into the 



LEV ACE AN. 145 

condition of Devachan in such rare visions, and 
thus becomes subject to the vivid delusions of 
that existence. It is under the impression that 
the spirits, with which it is in Devachanic 
bonds of sympathy, have come down to visit 
earth and itself, while the converse operation 
has really taken place. The clairvoyant's spirit 
has been raised towards those in Devachan. 
Thus many of the subjective spiritual commu- 
nications — most of them when the sensitives 
are pure-minded — are real, though it is most 
difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in 
his mind the true and correct pictures of what 
he sees and hears. In the same way some of 
the phenomena called psychography (though 
more rarely) are also real. The spirit of the 
sensitive getting odylized, so to say, by the 
aura of the spirit in the Devachan becomes for 
a few minutes that departed personality, and 
writes in the handwriting of the latter, in his 
language and in his thoughts as the}^ were 
during his lifetime. The two spirits become 
blended in one, and the preponderance of one 
over the other during such phenomena deter- 
mines the preponderance of personality in the 
characteristics exhibited. Thus, it may inci- 
dentally be observed, what is called rapport, 
is, in plain fact, an identity of molecular vibra- 
tion between the astral part of the incarnate 



146 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

medium and the astral part of the disincarnate 
personality. 

As already indicated, and as the common 
sense of the matter would show, there are great 
varieties of states in Devachan, and each per- 
sonality drops into its befitting place there. 
Thence, consequently, he emerges in his befit- 
ting place in the world of causes, this earth or 
another, as the case may be, when his time for 
re-birth comes. Coupled with survival of the 
affinities, comprehensively described as Karma, 
the affinities both for good and evil engendered 
by the previous life, this process will be seen to 
accomplish nothing less than an explanation of 
the problem which has always been regarded 
as so incomprehensible — the inequalities of 
life. The conditions on which we enter life are 
the consequences of the use we have made of 
our last set of conditions. They do not impede 
the development of fresh Karma, whatever they 
may be, for this will be generated by the use 
we make of them in turn. Nor is it to be sup- 
posed that every event of a current life which 
bestows joy or sorrow is old Karma bearing 
fruit. Many may be the immediate conse- 
quences of acts in the life to which they belong 
■ — ready-money transactions with Nature, so to 
speak, of which it may be hardly necessary to 
make any entry in her books. But the great 



DEVACHAN. 147 

inequality of life, as regards the start in it 
which different human beings make, is a mani- 
fest consequence of old Karma, the infinite va- 
rieties of which always keep up a constant sup- 
ply of recruits for all the manifold varieties of 
human condition. 

It must not be supposed that the real Ego 
slips instantaneously at death from the earth- 
life and its entanglements into the Devachanic 
condition. When the division or purification 
of the fifth principle has been accomplished 
in Kama loca by the contending attractions of 
the fourth and sixth principles, the real Ego 
passes into a period of unconscious gestation. 
I have spoken already of the way in which the 
Devachanic life is itself a process of growth, 
maturity, and decline ; but the analogies of 
earth are even more closely preserved. There 
is a spiritual ante-natal state at the entrance to 
spiritual life, as there is a similar and equally 
unconscious physical state at the entrance to 
objective life. And this period, in different 
cases, may be of very different duration — from 
a few moments to immense periods of years. 
When a man dies, his soul or fifth principle be- 
comes unconscious and loses all remembrance 
of things internal as well as external. Whether 
his stay in Kama loca has to last but a few mo- 
ments, hours, days, weeks, months or years; 



148 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

whether he dies a natural or a violent death ; 
whether this occurs in youth or age, and 
whether the Ego has been good, bad, or indif- 
ferent, his consciousness leaves him as suddenly 
as the flame leaves the wick when it is blown 
out. When life has retired from the last par- 
ticle of the brain matter, his perceptive facul- 
ties become extinct forever, and his spiritual 
powers of cognition and volition become for the 
time being as extinct as the others. His Ma- 
yavi-rupa may be thrown into objectivity as in 
the case of apparitions after death, but unless 
it is projected by a conscious or intense desire 
to see or appear to some one shooting through 
the dying brain, the apparition will be simply 
automatic. The revival of consciousness in 
Kama loca is obviously, from what has been al- 
ready said, a phenomenon that depends on the 
characteristic of the principles passing, uncon- 
sciously at the moment, out of the dying body. 
It may become tolerably complete under cir- 
cumstances by no means to be desired, or it 
may be obliterated by a rapid passage into the 
gestation state leading to Devachan. This ges- 
tation state may be of very long duration in 
proportion to the Ego's spiritual stamina, and 
Devachan accounts for the remainder of the 
period between death and the next physical re- 
birth. The whole period is, of course, of very 



DEVACHAN. 149 

varying length in the case of different persons, 
but re-birth in less than fifteen hundred years 
is spoken of as almost impossible, while the 
stay in Devachan which rewards a very rich 
Karma is sometimes said to extend to enormous 
periods. 



CHAPTER Vh 
KAMA LOCA. 

The statements already made in reference to 
the destiny of the higher human principles at 
death will pave the way for a comprehension of 
the circumstances in which the inferior remnant 
of these principles finds itself, after the real 
Ego has passed either into the Devachanic 
state or that unconscious intervening period of 
preparation therefor which corresponds to phys- 
ical gestation. The sphere in which such rem- 
nants remain for a time is known to occult 
science as Kama loca, the region of desire, not 
the region in which desire is developed to any 
abnormal degree of intensity as compared with 
desire as it attaches to earth-life, but the sphere 
in which that sensation of desire, which is a 
part of the earth-life, is capable of surviving. 

It will be obvious, from what has been said 
about Devachan, that a large part of the recol- 
lections which accumulate round the human 
Ego during life are incompatible in their nature 
with the pure subjective existence to which the 






KAMA LOCA. 151 

real, durable, spiritual Ego passes ; but they 
are not necessarily on that account extinguished 
or annihilated out of existence. They inhere 
in certain molecules of those finer ( but not fin- 
est) principles, which escape from the body at 
death ; and just as dissolution separates what 
is loosely called the soul from the body, so also 
it provokes a further separation between the 
constituent elements of the soul. So much of 
the fifth principle, or human soul, which is in 
its nature assimilable with, or has gravitated 
upwards toward, the sixth principle, the spirit- 
ual soul, passes with the germ of that divine 
soul into the superior region, or state of Deva- 
chan, in which it separates itself almost com- 
pletely from the attractions of the earth ; quite 
completely, as far as its own spiritual course is 
concerned, though it still has certain affinities 
with the spiritual aspirations emanating from 
the earth, and may sometimes draw these to- 
wards itself. But the animal soul, or fourth 
principle (the element of will and desire as as- 
sociated with objective existence), has no up- 
ward attraction, and no more passes away from 
the earth than the particles of the body con- 
signed to the grave. It is not in the grave, how- 
ever, that this fourth principle can be put away. 
It is not spiritual in its nature or affinities, but 
it is not physical in its nature. In its affinities 



152 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

it is physical, and hence the result. It remains 
within the actual physical local attraction of the 
earth — in the earth's atmosphere — or, since it 
is not the gases of the atmosphere that are spe- 
cially to be considered in connection with the 
problem in hand, let us say, in Kama loca. 

And with the fourth principle a large part 
(as regards most of mankind unfortunately, 
though a part very variable in its relative mag- 
nitude) inevitably remains. There are plenty 
of attributes which the ordinary composite hu- 
man being exhibits, many ardent feelings, de- 
sires, and acts, floods of recollections, which 
even if not concerned with a life as ardent per- 
haps as those which have to do with the higher 
aspirations, are nevertheless essentially belong- 
ing to the physical life, which take time to die. 
They remain behind in association with the 
fourth principle, which is altogether of the 
earthly perishable nature, and disperse or fade 
out, or are absorbed into the respective univer- 
sal principles to which they belong, just as the 
body is absorbed into the earth, in progress of 
time, and rapidly or slowly in proportion to the 
tenacity of their substance. And where, mean- 
while, is the consciousness of the individual 
who has died or dissolved ? Assuredly in Deva- 
chan ; but a difficulty presents itself to the 
mind untrained in occult science, from the fact 



KAMA LOCA. 153 

that a semblance of consciousness inheres in the 
astral portion — the fourth principle with a 
portion of the fifth — which remains behind in 
Kama loca. The individual consciousness, it 
is argued, cannot be in two places at once. But 
first of all, to a certain extent, it can. As may 
be perceived presently, it is a mistake to speak 
of consciousness, as we understand the feeling 
in life, attaching to the astral shell or remnant ; 
but nevertheless a certain spurious semblance 
may be reawakened in that shell, without hav- 
ing any connection with the real consciousness 
all the while growing in strength and vitality 
in the spiritual sphere. There is no power on 
the part of the shell of taking in and assimilat- 
ing new ideas and initiating courses of action 
on the basis of those new ideas. But there is 
in the shell a survival of volitional impulses im- 
parted to it during life. The fourth principle 
is the instrument of volition though not voli- 
tion itself, and impulses imparted to it during 
life by the higher principles may run their 
course and produce results almost indistinguish- 
able for careless observers from those which 
would ensue were the four higher principles 
really all united as in life. 

It, the fourth principle, is the receptacle or 
vehicle during life of that essentially moral con- 
sciousness which cannot suit itself to conditions 



154 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

of permanent existence ; but the consciousness 
even of the lower principles during life is a very 
different thing from the vaporous fleeting and 
uncertain consciousness, which continues to 
inhere in them when that which really is the 
life, the overshadowing of them, or vitalizatioh 
of them by the infusion of the spirit, has ceased 
as far as they are concerned. Language cannot 
render all the facets of a many-sided idea in- 
telligible at once any more than a plain draw- 
ing can show all sides of a solid object at once. 
And at the first glance different drawings of 
the same object from different points of view 
may seem so unlike as to be unrecognizable as 
the same ; but none the less, by the time they 
are put together in the mind, will their diver- 
sities be seen to harmonize. So with these 
subtle attributes of the invisible principles of 
man — no treatise can do more than discuss 
their different aspects separately. The vari- 
ous views suggested must mingle in the read- 
er's mind before the complete conception corre- 
sponds to the realities of Nature. 

In life the fourth principle is the seat of will 
and desire, but it is not will itself. It must be 
alive, in union with the overshadowing spirit, 
or " one life," to be thus the agent of that very 
elevated function of life — will, in its sublime 
potency. As already mentioned, the Sanskrit 



KAMA LOCA. 155 

names of the higher principles connote the idea 
that they are vehicles of the one life. Not 
that the one life is a separable molecular 
principle itself, it is the union of all — the 
influences of the spirit ; but in truth the idea 
is too subtle for language, perhaps for intellect 
itself. Its manifestation in the present case, 
however, is apparent enough. Whatever the 
willing fourth principle may be when alive, it 
is no longer capable of active will when dead. 
But then, under certain abnormal conditions, it 
may partially recover life for a time ; and this 
fact it is which explains many, though by no 
means all, of the phenomena of spiritualistic 
mediumship. The " elementary," be it remem- 
bered — as the astral shell has generally been 
called in former occult writings — is liable to 
be galvanized for a time in the mediumistic 
current into a state of consciousness and life 
which may be suggested by the first condition 
of a person who, carried into a strange room in 
a state of insensibility during illness, wakes up 
feeble, confused in mind, gazing about with a 
blank feeling of bewilderment, taking in im- 
pressions, hearing words addressed to him and 
answering vaguely. Such a state of conscious- 
ness is unassociated with the notions of past or 
future. It is an automatic consciousness, de- 
rived from the medium. A medium, be it 



156 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

remembered, is a person whose principles are 
loosely united and susceptible of being bor- 
rowed by other beings, or floating principles, 
having an attraction for some of them or some 
part of them. Now what happens in the case 
of a shell drawn into the neighborhood of 
a person so constituted ? Suppose the person 
from whom the shell has been cast died with 
some strong unsatisfied desire, not necessarily 
of an unholy sort, but connected entirely with 
the earth-life, a desire, for example, to com- 
municate some fact to a still living person. 
Certainly the shell does not go about in Kama 
loca with a persistent intelligent conscious pur- 
pose of communicating that fact ; but, amongst 
others, the volitional impulse to do this has 
been infused into the fourth principle, and 
while the molecules of that principle remain in 
association, and that may be for many years, 
they only need a partial galvanization into life 
again to become operative in the direction of 
the original impulse. Such a shell comes into 
contact with a medium (not so dissimilar in 
nature from the person who has died as to 
render a rapport impossible), and something 
from the fifth principle of the medium associates 
itself with the wandering fourth principle and 
sets the original impulse to work. So much 
consciousness and so much intelligence as may 



KAMA LOCA. 157 

be required to guide the fourth principle in the 
use of the immediate means of communication 
at hand — a slate and pencil, or a table to rap 
upon — are borrowed from the medium, and 
then the message given may be the message 
which the dead person originally ordered his 
fourth principle to give, so to speak, but which 
the shell has never till then had an opportunity 
of giving. It may be argued that the produc- 
tion of writing on a closed slate, or of raps on a 
table without the use of a knuckle or a stick, 
is itself a feat of a marvelous nature, bespeak- 
ing a knowledge on the part of the communi- 
cating intelligence of powers of Nature we in 
physical life know nothing about. But the 
shell is itself in the astral world ; in the realm 
of such powers. A phenomenal manifestation 
is its natural mode of dealing. It is no more 
conscious of producing a wonderful result by 
the use of new powers acquired in a higher 
sphere of existence than we are conscious of 
the forces by which in life the volitional im- 
pulse is communicable to nerves and muscles. 

But, it may be objected, the " communicating 
intelligence " at a spiritual seance will constant- 
ly perform remarkable feats for no other than 
their own sake, to exhibit the power over 
natural forces which it possesses. The reader 
will please remember, however, that occult 



158 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

science is very far from saying that all the 
phenomena of spiritualism are traceable to one 
class of agents. Hitherto in this treatise little 
has been said of the " elementals," those semi- 
intelligent creatures of the astral light who 
belong to a wholly different kingdom of Nature 
from ourselves. Nor is it possible at present 
to enlarge upon their attributes for the simple 
and obvious reason, that knowledge concerning 
the elementals, detailed knowledge on that sub- 
ject, and in regard to the way they work, is 
scrupulously withheld by the adepts of occult- 
ism. To possess such knowledge is to wield 
power, and the whole motive of the great se- 
crecy in which occult science is shrouded turns 
upon the danger of conferring powers upon peo- 
ple who have not, first of all, by undergoing 
the training of initiates, given moral guarantees 
of their trustworthiness. It is by command 
over the elementals that some of the greatest 
physical feats of adeptship are accomplished ; 
and it is by the spontaneous playful acts of the 
elementals that the greatest physical phenom- 
ena of the seance room are brought about. 
So also with almost all Indian Fakirs and 
Yogis of the lower class who have power of 
producing phenomenal results. By some means, 
by a scrap of inherited occult teaching, most 
likely, they have come into possession of a mor« 



KAMA LOCA. 159 

sel of occult science. Not necessarily that they 
understand the action of the forces they employ 
any more than an Indian servant in a telegraph 
office, taught how to mix the ingredients of the 
liquid used in a galvanic battery, understands 
the theory of electric science. He can perform 
the one trick he has been taught ; and so with 
the inferior Yogi. He has got influence over 
certain elementals, and can work certain won- 
ders. 

Returning to a consideration of the ex-human 
shells in Kama loca, it may be argued that 
their behavior in spiritual seances is not cov- 
ered by the theory that they have had some 
message to deliver from their late master, and 
have availed themselves of the mediumship 
present to deliver it. Apart altogether from 
phenomena that may be put aside as elemental 
pranks, we sometimes encounter a continuity of 
intelligence on the part of the elementary or 
shell that bespeaks much more than the sur- 
vival of impulses from the former life. Quite 
so; but with portions of the medium's fifth 
principle conveyed into it the fourth principle 
is once more an instrument in the hands of a 
master. With a medium entranced so that the 
energies of his fifth principle are conveyed into 
the wandering shell to a very large extent, the 
result is that there is a very tolerable revival of 



160 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

consciousness in the shell for the time being, as 
regards the given moment. But what is the 
nature of such consciousness, after all ? Noth- 
ing more, really, than a reflected light. Mem- 
ory is one thing, and perceptive faculties quite 
another. A madman may remember very 
clearly some portions of his past life; yet he 
is unable to perceive anything in its true light, 
for the higher portion of his Manas (fifth) and 
Buddhi (sixth) principles are paralyzed in him 
and have left him. Could an animal — a dog, 
for instance — explain himself, he could prove 
that his memory, in direct relation to his ca- 
nine personality, is as fresh as his master's ; 
nevertheless, his memory and instinct cannot 
be called perceptive faculties. 

Once that a shell is in the aura of a medium, 
he will perceive, clearly enough, whatever he 
can perceive through the borrowed principles 
of the medium, and through organs in mag- 
netic sympath}^ therewith ; but this will not 
carry him be}^ond the range of the perceptive 
faculties of the medium, or of some one else 
present in the circle. Hence the often rational 
and sometimes highly intelligent answers he 
may give, and hence, also, his invariably com- 
plete oblivion of all things unknown to that 
medium or circle, or not found in the lower 
recollections of his late personality, galvanized 



KAMA LOCA. 161 

afresh by the influences under which he is 
placed. The shell of a highly intelligent, 
learned, but utterly unspiritual man, who died 
a natural death, will last longer than those of 
weaker temperament, and (the shadow of his 
own memory helping) he may deliver, through 
trance-speakers, orations of no contemptible 
kind. But these will never be found to relate 
to anything beyond the subjects he thought 
much and earnestly of during life, nor will any 
word ever fall from him indicating a real ad- 
vance of knowledge. 

It will easily be seen that a shell, drawn into 
the mediumistic current, and getting into rap- 
port with the medium's fifth principle, is not 
by any means sure to be animated with a con- 
sciousness (even for what such consciousnesses 
are worth) identical with the personality of the 
dead person from whose higher principles it 
was shed. It is just as likely to reflect some 
quite different personality, caught from the 
suggestions of the medium's mind. In this 
personality it will perhaps remain and answer 
for a time ; then some new current of thought, 
thrown into the minds of the people present, 
will find its echo in the fleeting impressions of 
the elementary, and his sense of identity will 
begin to waver ; for a little while it flickers 
over two or three conjectures, and. ends by go- 
11 



162 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ing out altogether for a time. The shell is 
once more sleeping in the astral light, and may- 
be unconsciously wafted in a few moments to 
the other ends of the earth. 

Besides the ordinary elementary or shell of 
the kind just described, Kama loca is the abode 
of another class of astral entities, which must 
be taken into account if we desire to compre- 
hend the various conditions under which hu^ 
man creatures may pass from this life to others. 
So far we have been examining the normal 
course of events, when people die in a natural 
manner. But an abnormal death will lead to 
abnormal consequences. Thus, in the case of 
persons committing suicide, and in that of per- 
sons killed by sudden accident, results ensue 
which differ widely from those following nat- 
ural deaths. A thoughtful consideration of 
such cases must show, indeed, that in a world 
governed by rule and law, by affinities work- 
ing out their regular effects in that deliberate 
way which Nature favors, the case of a person 
dying a sudden death at a time when all his 
principles are firmly united, and ready to hold 
together for twenty, forty, or sixty years, what- 
ever the natural remainder of his life would be, 
must surely be something different from that 
of a person who, by natural processes of decay, 
finds himself, when the vital machine stops, 



KAMA LOCA. 165 

readily separable into his various principles, 
each prepared to travel its separate way. Na- 
ture, always fertile in analogies, at once illus- 
trates the idea by showing us a ripe and an 
unripe fruit. From out of the first the inner 
stone will come away as cleanly and easily as a 
hand from a glove, while from the unripe fruit 
the stone can only be torn with difficulty, half 
the pulp clinging to its surface. Now, in the 
case of the sudden accidental death or of the 
suicide, the stone has to be torn from the un- 
ripe fruit. There is no question here about the 
moral blame which may attach to the act of 
suicide. Probably, in the majority of cases, 
such moral blame does attach to it, but that is 
a question of Karma which will follow the per- 
son concerned into the next re-birth, like any 
other Karma, and has nothing to do with the 
immediate difficulty such person may find in 
getting himself thoroughly and wholesomely 
dead. This difficulty is manifestly just the 
same whether a person kills himself, or is killed 
in the heroic discharge of duty, or dies the vic- 
tim of an accident over which he has no con- 
trol whatever. 

As an ordinary rule, when a person dies, the 
long account of Karma naturally closes itself ; 
that is to say, the complicated set of affinities 
which have been set up during life in the first 



164 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

durable principle, the fifth is no longer suscep- 
tible of extension. The balance-sheet, so to 
speak, is made out afterwards, when the time 
comes for the next objective birth ; or, in other 
words, the affinities long dormant in Devachan, 
by reason of the absence there of any scope for 
their action, assert themselves as soon as they 
come in contact once more with physical exis- 
tence. But the fifth principle, in which these 
affinities are grown, cannot be separated in the 
case of the person dying prematurely from the 
earthly principle — the fourth. The elemen- 
tary, therefore, which finds itself in Kama loca, 
on its violent expulsion from the body, is not a 
mere shell — it is the person himself who was 
lately alive minus nothing but the body. In 
the true sense of the word he is not dead at 
all. 

Certainly elementaries of this kind may com- 
municate very effectually at spiritual seances at 
their own heavy cost; for they are unfortu- 
nately able, by reason of the completeness of 
their astral constitution, to go on generating 
Karma, to assuage their thirst for life at the 
unwholesome spring of mediumship. If they 
were of a very material sensual type in life, the 
enjoyments they will seek will be of a kind the 
indulgence of which in their disembodied state 
may readily be conceived even more prejudicial 



KAMA LOCA. 165 

to their Karma than similar indulgences would 
have been in life. In such cases facilis est de- 
scensus. Cut off in the full flush of earthly- 
passions which bind them to familiar scenes, 
they are enticed by the opportunity which me- 
diums afford for the gratification of these vica- 
riously. They become the incubi and succubi 
of mediaeval writing, demons of thirst and glut- 
tony, provoking their victims to crime. A brief 
essay on this subject, which I wrote last year, 
and from which I have reproduced some of the 
sentences just given, appeared in "The Theoso- 
phist," with a note, the authenticity of which I 
have reason to trust, and the tenor of which 
was as follows : — 

" The variety of states after death is greater 
if possible than the variety of human lives upon 
this earth. The victims of accident do not 
generally become earth walkers, only those fall- 
ing into the current of attraction who die full 
of some engrossing earthly passion, the selfish 
who have never given a thought to the welfare 
of others. Overtaken by death in the consum- 
mation, whether real or imaginary, of some 
master passion of their lives, the desire remain- 
ing unsatisfied even after a full realization, and 
they still craving for more, such personalities 
can never pass beyond the earth attraction to 
wait for the hour of deliverance in happy igno- 



166 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ranee and full oblivion. Among the suicides, 
those to whom the above statement about pro- 
voking their victims to crime, etc., applies, are 
that class who commit the act in consequence of 
a crime to escape the penalty of human law or 
their own remorse. Natural law cannot be 
broken with impunity ; the inexorable causal 
relation between action and result has its full 
sway only in the world of effects, the Kama 
loca, and every case is met there by an ade- 
quate punishment, and in a thousand ways, 
that would require volumes even to describe 
them superficially." 

Those who " wait for the hour of deliverance 
in happy ignorance and full oblivion " are of 
course such victims of accident as have already 
on earth engendered pure and elevated affinities, 
and after death are as much beyond the reach 
of temptation in the shape of mediumistic cur- 
rents as they would have been inaccessible in 
life to common incitements to crime. 

Entities of another kind occasionally to be 
found in Kama loca have yet to be considered. 
We have followed the higher principles of per- 
sons recently dead, observing the separation of 
the astral dross from the spiritually durable 
portion, that spiritually durable portion being 
either holy or Satanic in its nature, and pro- 
vided for in Devachan or Avitchi accordingly 



KAMA LOCA. 167 

We have examined the nature of the elemen- 
tary shell cast off and preserving for a time a 
deceptive resemblance to a true entity ; we 
have paid attention also to the exceptional cases 
of real four principled beings in Kama loca who 
are the victims of accident or suicide. But 
what happens to a personality which has abso- 
lutely no atom of spirituality, no trace of spir- 
itual affinity in its fifth principle, either of the 
good or bad sort ? Clearly in such a case there 
is nothing for the sixth principle to attract to 
itself. Or, in other words, such a personality 
has already lost its sixth principle by the time 
death comes. But Kama loca is no more a 
sphere of existence for such a personality than 
the subjective world; Kama loca maybe per- 
manently inhabited by astral beings, by ele- 
mentals, but can only be an antechamber to 
some other state for human beings. In the case 
imagined, the surviving personality is promptly 
drawn into the current of its future destinies, 
and these have nothing to do with this earth's 
atmosphere or with Devachan, but with that 
" eighth sphere " of which occasional mention 
will be found in older occult writings. It will 
have been unintelligible to ordinary readers 
hitherto why it was called the " eighth " sphere, 
but since the explanation, now given out for the 
first time, of the sevenfold constitution of our 



168 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

planetary system, the meaning will be clear 
enough. The spheres of the cyclic process of 
evolution are seven in number, but there is an 
eighth in connection with our earth, our earth 
being, it will be remembered, the turning-point 
in the cyclic chain, and this eighth sphere is 
out of circuit, a cul de sac, and the bourne from 
which it may be truly said no traveler returns. 

It will readily be guessed that the only sphere 
connected with our planetary chain, which is 
lower than our own in the scale, having spirit 
at the top and matter at the bottom, must it- 
self be no less visible to the eye and to optical 
instruments than the earth itself, and as the 
duties which this sphere has to perform in our 
planetary system are immediately associated 
with this earth, there is not much mystery left 
now in the riddle of the eighth sphere, nor as 
to the place in the sky where it may be sought. 
The conditions of existence there, however, are 
topics on which the adepts are very reserved in 
their communications to uninitiated pupils, and 
concerning these I have for the present no fur- 
ther information to give. 

One statement though is definitely made, 
viz., that such a total degradation of a person- 
ality as may suffice to draw it, after death, 
into the attraction of the eighth sphere, is of 
very rare occurrence. From the vast majority 



KAMA LOCA. 169 

of lives there is something which the higher 
principles may draw to themselves, something 
to redeem the page of existence just passed 
from total destruction : and here it must be 
remembered that the recollections of life in 
Devachan, very vivid as they are, as far as they 
go, touch only those episodes in life which are 
productive of the elevated sort of happiness of 
which alone Devachan is qualified to take cog- 
nizance ; whereas the life from which for the 
time being the cream is thus skimmed may 
come to be remembered eventually in all its 
details quite fully. That complete remem- 
brance is only achieved by the individual at 
the threshold of a far more exalted spiritual 
state than that which we are now concerned 
with, and which is attained far later on in the 
progress of the vast cycles of evolution. Each 
one of the long series of lives that will have 
been passed through will then be, as it were, a 
page in a book to which the possessor can turn 
back at pleasure, even though many such pages 
will then seem to him, most likely, very dull 
reading, and will not be frequently referred to. 
It is this revival eventually of recollection con- 
cerning all the long-forgotten personalities that 
is really meant by the doctrine of the Resurrec- 
tion. But we have no time at present to stop 
and unravel the enigmas of symbolism as bear- 



170 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ing upon the teachings at present under con- 
veyance to the reader. It may be worth while 
to do this as a separate undertaking at a later 
period ; but meanwhile, to revert to the narra- 
tive of how the facts stand, it may be explained 
that in the whole book of pages, when at last 
the "resurrection" has been accomplished, 
there will be no entirely infamous pages ; for 
even if any given spiritual individuality has 
occasionally, during its passage through this 
world, been linked with personalities so deplor- 
ably and desperately degraded that they have 
passed completely into the attraction of the 
lower vortex, that spiritual individuality in 
such cases will have retained in its own affini- 
ties no trace or taint of them. Those pages 
will, as it were, have been cleanly torn out from 
the book. And, as at the end of the struggle, 
after crossing the Kama loca, the spiritual indi- 
viduality will have passed into the unconscious 
gestation state from which, skipping the Deva- 
chan state, it will be directly (though not 
immediately in time) re-born into its next life 
of objective activity, all the self-consciousness 
connected with that existence will have passed 
into the lower world, there eventually to " per- 
ish everlastingly ; " an expression of which, as 
of so many more, modern theology has proved 
a faithless custodian, making pure nonsense 
out of psycho-scientific facts. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 

A general account has already been given 
of the way in which the great evolutionary 
life-wave sweeps round and round the seven 
worlds which compose the planetary chain of 
which our earth is a part. Further assistance 
may now be offered, with the view of expanding 
this general idea into a fuller comprehension of 
the processes to which it relates. And no one 
additional chapter of the great story will do 
more towards rendering its character intelligi- 
ble than an explanation of certain phenomena 
connected with the progress of worlds, that 
may be conveniently called obscurations. 

Students of occult philosophy who enter on 
that pursuit with minds already abundantly 
furnished in other ways are very liable to mis- 
interpret its earlier statements. Everything 
cannot be said at once, and the first broad 
explanations are apt to suggest conceptions in 
regard to details which are most likely to be 
erroneous with the most active-minded and 



172 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

intelligent thinkers. Such readers are not con- 
tent with shadowy outlines even for a moment. 
Imagination fills in the picture, and if its work 
is undisturbed for any length of time, the au- 
thor of it will be surprised afterwards to find 
that later information is incompatible with that 
which he had come to regard as having been 
distinctly taught in the beginning. Now in 
this treatise the writer's effort is to convey 
the information in such a way that hasty weed- 
growths of the mind may be prevented as far 
as possible ; but in this very effort it is neces- 
sary sometimes to run on quickly in advance, 
leaving some details, even very important de- 
tails, to be picked up during a second journey 
over the old ground. So now the reader must 
be good enough to go back to the explanation 
given in Chapter III. of the evolutionary prog- 
ress through the whole planetary chain. 

Some few words were said then concerning 
the manner in which the life impulse passed on 
from planet to planet in " rushes or gushes ; 
not by an even continuous flow." Now the 
course of evolution in its earlier stages is so 
far continuous that the preparation of several 
planets for the final tidal-wave of humanity 
may be going on simultaneously. Indeed, the 
preparation of all the seven planets may, at one 
stage of the proceedings, be going on simulta* 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 173 

neously, but the important point to remember 
is that the main wave of evolution — the fore- 
most growing wave — cannot be in more than 
one place at a time. The process goes on in 
the way which may now be described, and 
which the reader may be the better able to fol- 
low, if he constructs either on paper or in his 
own mind a diagram consisting of seven circles 
(representing the worlds) arranged in a ring. 
Calling them A, B, C, etc., it will be observed 
from what has been already stated that circle 
(or globe) D standi for our earth. Now the 
kingdoms of Nature as known .to occultists, be 
it remembered, are seven in number ; three hav- 
ing to do with astral and elementary forces, 
preceding the grosser material kingdoms in the 
order of their development. Kingdom 1 evolves 
on globe A, and passes on to B, as kingdom 2 
begins to evolve on A. Carry out this system 
and of course it will be seen that kingdom 1 is 
evolving on globe G, while kingdom 7, the hu- 
man kingdom, is evolving on globe A. But 
now what happens as kingdom 7 passes on to 
globe B ? There is no eighth kingdom to en- 
gage the activities of globe A. The great pro- 
cesses of evolution have culminated in the final 
tidal-wave of humanity, which, as it sweeps on, 
leaves a temporary lethargy of Nature behind. 
When the life-wave goes on to B, in fact, globe 



174 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

A passes for the time into a state of obscura- 
tion. This state is not one of decay, dissolu- 
tion, or anything that can be properly called 
death. Decay itself, though its aspect is apt 
to mislead the mind, is a condition of activity 
in a certain direction, this consideration afford- 
ing a clue to the meaning of a great deal which 
is otherwise meaningless in that part of Hindu 
mythology which relates to the deities presid- 
ing over destruction. The obscuration of a 
world is a total suspension of its activity ; this 
does not mean that the moment the last human 
monad passes on from any given world that 
world is paralyzed by any convulsion, or sub- 
sides into the enchanted trance of a sleeping 
palace. The animal and vegetable life goes on 
as before, for a time, but its character begins to 
recede instead of advancing. The great life- 
wave has left it, and the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms gradually return to the condition in 
which they were found when the great life- 
wave first reached them. Enormous periods of 
time are available for this slow process by 
which the obscured world settles into sleep, for 
it will be seen that obscuration in each case 
lasts six times l as long as the period of each. 

1 Or we may say five times, allowing for the half period of 
morning which precedes and the half period of evening which fol- 
lows the dav of full activity. 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 175 

world's occupation by the human life-wave. 
That is to say, the process which is accom- 
plished as above described in connection with 
the passage of the life-wave from globe A to 
globe B is repeated all along the chain. When 
the wave passes to C, B is left in obscuration 
as well as A. Then D receives the life-wave, 
and A, B, C are in obscuration. When the 
wave reaches G, all the preceding six worlds 
are in obscuration. Meanwhile the life-wave 
passes on in a certain regular progression, the 
symmetrical character of which is very satis- 
factory to scientific instincts. The reader will 
be prepared to pick up the idea at once, in 
view of the explanations already given of the 
way in which humanity evolves through seven 
great races, during each round period on a 
planet ; that is to say, during the occupation 
of such planet by the tidal wave of life. The 
fourth race is obviously the middle race of the 
series. As soon as this middle point is turned, 
and the evolution of the fifth race on any given 
planet begins, the preparation for humanity be- 
gins on the next. The evolution of the fifth 
race on E, for example, is commensurate with 
the evolution, or rather with the revival, of the 
mineral kingdom on D, and so on. That is to 
say, the evolution of the sixth race on D coin- 
cides with the revival of the vegetable kingdom 



176 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

on E ; the seventh race on D with the revival 
of the animal kingdom on E ; and then when 
the last monads of the seventh race on D have 
passed into the subjective state or world of ef- 
fects, the human period on E begins, and the 
first race begins its development there. Mean- 
while the twilight period on the world preced- 
ing D has been deepening into the night of ob- 
scuration in the same progressive wa}^ and 
obscuration there definitely sets in when the 
human period on D passes its half-way point. 
But just as the heart of a man beats and respi- 
ration continues, no matter how profound his 
sleep, there are processes of vital action which 
go on in the resting world even during the most 
profound depths of its repose. And these pre- 
serve, in view of the next return of the human 
wave, the results of the evolution that preceded 
its first arrival. Recovery for the re-awaking 
planet is a larger process than its subsidence 
into rest, for it has to attain a higher degree of 
perfection against the return of the human life- 
wave than that at which it was left when the 
wave last went onward from its shore. But 
with every new beginning, Nature is infused 
with a vigor of its own, — the freshness of a 
morning, — and the later obscuration period, 
which is a time of preparation and hopefulness 
as it were, invests evolution itself with a new 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 177 

momentum. By the time the great life-wave 
returns, all is ready for its reception. 

In the first essay on this subject it was 
roughly indicated that the various worlds mak- 
ing up our planetary chain were not all of the 
same materiality. Putting the conception of 
spirit at the north pole of the circle and that of 
matter at the south pole, the worlds of the de- 
scending arc vary in materiality and spiritual- 
ity, like those of the ascending arc. This varia- 
tion must now be considered more attentively 
if the reader wishes to realize the whole pro- 
cesses of evolution more fully than heretofore. 

Besides the earth, which is at the lowest ma- 
terial point, there are only two other worlds of 
our chain which are visible to physical eyes, — 
the one behind and the one in advance of it. 
These two worlds, as a matter of fact, are Mars 
and Mercury, — Mars being behind and Mer- 
cury in advance of us : Mars in a state of en- 
tire obscuration now as regards the human life- 
wave, Mercury just beginning to prepare for its 
next human period. 1 

1 It may be worth while here to remark for the benefit of people 
who ma}* be disposed, from physical science reading, to object 
that Mercury is too near the Sun, and consequently too hot to be a 
suitable place of habitation for man, that in the official report of 
the Astronomical Department of the United States on the recent 
■'Mount Whitney observations " statements will be found that 
may check too confident criticisms of occult science along that line. 
12 



178 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

The two planets of our chain that are behind 
Mars, and the two that are in advance of Mer- 
cury, are not composed of an order of matter 
which telescopes can take cognizance of. Four 
out of the seven are thus of an ethereal nature, 
which people who can only conceive matter in 
its earthly form will be inclined to call immate- 
rial. But they are not really immaterial at all. 
They are simply in a finer state of materiality 
than the earth, but their finer state does not in 
any way defeat the uniformity of Nature's de- 
sign in regard to the methods and stages of their 

The results of the Mount Whitney observations on selective absorp- 
tion of solar rays showed, according to the official reporter, that it 
would no longer be impossible to suggest the conditions of an at- 
mosphere which should render Mercury habitable at" the one ex- 
treme of the scale, and Saturn at the other. We have no concern 
with Saturn at present, nor, if it were necessary to explain on oc- 
cult principles the habitability of Mercury, should the task be at- 
tempted with calculations about selective absorption. The fact is 
that ordinary science makes at once too much and too little of the 
Sun, as the storehouse of force for the solar system, — too much in 
so far as the heat of planets has a great deal to do with another in- 
fluence quite distinct from the Sun, an influence which will not be 
thoroughly understood till more is known than at present about the 
correlations of heat and magnetism, and of the magnetic, meteoric 
dust, with which inter-planetary space is pervaded. However, it 
is enough — to rebut any objection that might be raised against 
1he explanations now in progress, from the point of view of Jpyal 
devotees of last year's science — to point out that such objections 
would be already out of date. Modern science is very progressive, 
— this is one of its greatest merits, — but it is not a meritorious 
habit with modern scientists to think, at each stage of its progress, 
)hat all conceptions incompatible with that stage must necessarily 
be absurd. 



THE HUMAN TIDE- WAVE. 179 

evolution. Within the scale of their subtle 
"invisibility," the successive rounds and races 
of mankind pass through their stages of greater 
and less materiality just as on this earth ; but 
whoever would comprehend them must compre- 
hend this earth first, and work out their deli- 
cate phenomena by correspondential inferences. 
Let us return, therefore, to the consideration of 
the great life-wave in its aspects on this planet. 
Just as the chain of worlds treated as a unity 
has its north and south, its spiritual and ma- 
terial, pole, working from spirituality down 
through materiality up to spirituality again, so 
the rounds of mankind constitute a similar se- 
ries which the chain of globes itself might be 
taken to symbolize. In the evolution of man 
in fact, on any one plane as on all, there is a 
descending and an ascending arc ; spirit, so to 
speak, involving itself into matter, and matter 
evolving itself into spirit. The lowest or most 
material point in the cycle thus becomes the 
inverted apex of physical intelligence, which is 
the masked manifestation of spiritual intelli- 
gence. Each round of mankind evolved on the 
downward arc (as each race of each round if 
we descend to the smaller mirror of the cosmos) 
must thus be more physically intelligent than 
its predecessor, and each in the upward arc 
must be invested with a more refined form of 



180 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

mentality commingled with greater spiritual in- 
tuitiveness. In the first round, therefore, we 
find man a relatively ethereal being compared 
even on earth with the state he has now at- 
tained here, not intellectual, but super-spiritual. 
Like the animal and vegetable shapes around 
him, he inhabits an immense but loosely organ- 
ized body. In the second round he is still gi- 
gantic and ethereal, but growing firmer and 
more condensed in body, — a more physical 
man, but still less intelligent than spiritual. 
In the third round he has developed a perfectly 
concrete and compacted body, at first the form 
rather of a giant ape than of a true man, but 
with intelligence coming more and more into 
the ascendant. In the last half of the third 
round his gigantic stature decreases, his body 
improves in texture, and he begins to be a ra- 
tional man. In the fourth round intellect, now 
fully developed, achieves enormous progress. 
The direct races with which the round begins 
acquire human speech as we understand it. 
The world teems with the results of intellectual 
activity and spiritual decline. At the half-way 
point of the fourth round here the polar point 
of the whole seven-world period is passed. 
From this point outwards the spiritual Ego 
begins its real struggle with body and mind 
to manifest its transcendental powers. Iu 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 181 

the fifth round the struggle continues, but the 
transcendental faculties are largely developed, 
though the struggle between these on the one 
hand with physical intellect and propensity is 
fiercer than ever, for the intellect of the fifth 
round as well as its spirituality is an advance 
on that of the fourth. In the sixth round 
humanity attains a degree of perfection both 
of body and soul, of intellect and spirituality, 
which ordinary mortals of the present epoch 
will not readily realize in their imaginations. 
The most supreme combinations of wisdom, 
goodness, and transcendental enlightenment 
ivhich the world has ever seen or thought of 
will represent the ordinary type of manhood. 
Those faculties which now, in the rare efflores- 
cence of a generation, enable some extraordi- 
narily gifted persons to explore the mysteries 
of Nature and gather the knowledge of which 
some crumbs are now being offered (through 
these writings and in other ways) to the ordi- 
nary world, will then be the common appanage 
of all. As to what the seventh round will be 
like, the most communicative occult teachers 
are solemnly silent. Mankind in the seventh 
round will be something altogether too God- 
like for mankind in the fourth round to fore- 
cast its attributes. 

During the occupation of any planet by the 



182 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

human life- wave, each individual monad is 
inevitably incarnated many times. This has 
been partly explained. If one existence only 
be passed by the monad in each of the branch 
races through which it must pass at least once, 
the total number accomplished during a round 
period on one planet would be 343, — the third 
power of seven. But as a matter of fact each 
monad is incarnated twice in each of the 
branch. races, and also comes in, necessarily, for 
some few extra incarnations as well. For rea- 
sons which are not easy for the outsider to di- 
vine, the possessors of occult knowledge are 
especially reluctant to give out numerical facts 
relating to cosmogony, though it is hard for the 
uninitiated to understand why these should be 
withheld. At present, for example, we shall 
not be able to state what is the actual duration 
in years of the round period. But a concession, 
which only those who have long been students 
of occultism by the old method will fully appre- 
ciate, has been made about the numbers with 
which we are immediately concerned ; and this 
concession is valuable at all events, as it helps 
to elucidate an interesting fact connected with 
evolution, on the threshold of which we have 
now arrived. This fact is that while the earth, 
for example, is inhabited, as at present, by 
fourth-round humanity, by the wave of human 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 183 

life, that is to say, on its fourth journey round 
the circle of the worlds, there may be present 
among us some few persons, few in relation to 
the total number, who, properly speaking, be- 
long to the fifth round. Now, in the sense of 
the term at present employed, it must not be 
supposed that by any miraculous process any 
individual unit has actually traveled round the 
whole chain of worlds once more often than his 
compeers. Under the explanations just given 
as to the way the tide- wave of humanity pro- 
gresses, it will be seen that this is impossible. 
Humanity has not yet paid its fifth visit even 
to the planet next in advance of our own. But 
individual monads may outstrip their compan- 
ions as regards their individual development, 
and so become exactly as mankind generally will 
be when the fifth round has been fully evolved. 
And this may be accomplished in two ways : 
A man born as an ordinary fourth-round man 
may, by processes of occult training, convert 
himself into a man having all the attributes of 
a fifth-round man, and so become what we may 
call an artificial fifth rounder. But indepen- 
dently of all exertions made by man in his pres- 
ent incarnation, a man may also be born a fifth 
rounder, though in the midst of fourth-round 
humanity by virtue of the total number of his 
previous incarnations. 



184 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

If x stands for the normal number of incarna- 
tions which in the course of Nature a monad 
must go through during a round period on one 
planet, and y for the margin of extra incarna- 
tions into which by a strong desire for phys- 
ical life he may force himself during such a 
period, then, as a matter of fact, 24^ (x -\- y) 
may exceed 28 x ; that is to say, in 3^ rounds 
a monad may have accomplished as many in- 
carnations as an ordinary monad would have 
accomplished in four complete rounds. In less 
than 3| rounds the result could not have been 
attained, so that it is only now that we have 
passed the half-way point of evolution on this 
half-way planet that the fifth rounders are be- 
ginning to drop in. 

It is not possible in the nature of things that 
a monad can do more than outstrip his com- 
panions by more than one round. This consid- 
eration, notwithstanding Buddha was a sixth- 
round man ; but this fact has to do with a great 
mystery outside the limits of the present calcu- 
lation. Enough for the moment to say that 
the evolution of a Buddha has to do with some- 
thing more than mere incarnations within the 
limits of one planetary chain. 

Since large numbers of lives have been recog 
nized in the above calculations as following one 
another in the successive incarnations of an 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 185 

individual monad, it is important here, with 
the view of averting misconceptions, to point 
out that the periods of time over which these 
incarnations range are so great chat vast inter- 
vals separate them, numerous as they are. As 
stated above, we cannot just now give the act- 
ual duration of the round periods. Nor, indeed, 
could any figures be quoted as indicating the 
duration of all round periods equally, for these 
vary in length within very wide limits. But 
here is a simple fact which has been definitely 
stated on the highest occult authority we are 
concerned with. The present race of human- 
ity, the present fifth race of the fourth-round 
period, began to evolve about one million of 
years ago. Now it is not yet finished ; but 
supposing that a million years had constituted 
the complete life of the race, 1 how would it 
have been divided up for each individual 
monad ? In a race there must be rather more 
than 100, and there can hardly be 120, incarna- 
tions for an individual monad. But say even 
there have been already 120 incarnations for 

1 The complete life of a race is certainly much longer than 
this ; but when we get to figures of this kind we are on very deli- 
cate ground, for precise periods are very profound secrets, for rea- 
sons uninitiated students ("lay chelas," as the adepts now say, 
coining a new designation to meet a new condition of things) can 
only imperfectly divine. Calculations like those given above may 
be trusted literally as far as they go, but must not rashly be made 
the basis of others. 



186 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

monads in the present race already, and say 
that the average life of each incarnation was a 
century ; even then we should only have 12,000 
years out of the million spent in physical ex- 
istence against 988,000 years spent in the sub- 
jective sphere, or there would be an average of 
more than 8,000 years between each incarna- 
tion. Certainly these intervening periods are 
of very variable length, but they can hardly 
even contract to anything less than 1,500 years, 
— leaving out of account, of course, the case of 
adepts who have, placed themselves quite out- 
side the operation of the ordinary law, — and 
1,500 years, if not an impossibly short, would 
be a very brief, interval between two rebirths. 

These calculations must be qualified by one 
or two considerations, however. The cases of 
children dying in infancy are quite unlike those 
of persons who attain full maturity, and for 
obvious reasons, that the explanations now al- 
ready given will suggest. A child dying be- 
fore it has lived long enough to begin to be 
responsible for its actions has generated no 
fresh Karma. The spiritual monad leaves that 
child's body in just the same state in which it 
entered it after its last death in Devachan. It 
has had no opportunity of playing on its new 
instrument, which has been broken before even 
it was tuned. A re-incarnation of the monad, 



THE HUMAN TIDE-WAVE. 187 

therefore, may take place immediately, on the 
line of its old attraction. But the monad so 
re-incarnated is not to be spiritually identified 
in any way with the dead child. So, in the 
same way, with a monad getting into the body 
of a born idiot. The instrument cannot be 
tuned, so it cannot play on that any more than 
on the child's body in the first few years of 
childhood. But both these cases are manifest 
exceptions that do not alter the broad rule 
above laid down for all persons attaining ma- 
turity, and living their earth lives for good or 
evil. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 

The course of Nature provides, as the reader 
will now have seen, for the indefinite prog- 
ress towards higher phases of existence of all 
human entities. But no less will it have been 
seen that by endowing these entities, as they 
advance, with ever-increasing faculties and by 
constantly enlarging the scope of their activity, 
Nature also furnishes each human entity with 
more and more decisive opportunities of choos- 
ing between good and evil. In the earlier 
rounds of humanity this privilege of selection 
is not fully developed, and responsibility of ac- 
tion is correspondingly incomplete. The ear- 
lier rounds of humanity, in fact, do not invest 
the Ego with spiritual responsibility at all, in 
the larger sense of the term which we are now 
approaching. The Devachanic periods which 
follow each objective existence in turn dispose 
fully of its merits and demerits, and the most 
deplorable personality which the Ego during the 
first half of its evolution can possibly develop 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 189 

is merely dropped out of the account as regards 
the larger undertaking, while the erring per- 
sonality itself pays its relatively brief penalt}-, 
and troubles Nature no more. But the second 
half of the great evolutionary period is carried 
on on different principles. The phases of exist- 
ence which are now coming into view cannot 
be entered upon by the Ego without positive 
merits of its own appropriate to the new devel- 
opments in prospect ; it is not enough that the 
now fully responsible and highly gifted being 
which man becomes at the great turning-point 
in his career should float idly on the stream of 
progress ; he must begin to swim, if he wishes 
to push his way forward. 

Debarred by the complexity of the subject 
from dealing with all its features simultane- 
ously, our survey of Nature has so far contem- 
plated the seven rounds of human development, 
which constitute the whole planetary undertak- 
ing with which we are concerned, as a continu- 
ous series throughout which it is the natural 
destiny of humanity in general to pass. But it 
will be remembered that humanity in the sixth 
round has been spoken of so highly developed 
that the sublime attributes and faculties of the 
highest adept-ship are the common appanage of 
all ; while in the seventh round the race has 
almost emerged from humanity into divinity. 



190 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Now every human being in this stage of devel- 
opment will still be identified by an uninter- 
rupted connection with all the personalities 
which have been strung upon that thread of 
life from the beginning of the great evolution- 
ary process. Is it conceivable that the charac- 
ter of such personalities is of no consequence in 
the long run, and that two God-like beings 
might stand side by side in the seventh round, 
developed, the one from a long series of blame- 
less and serviceable existences, the other from 
an equally long series of evil and groveling 
lives? That surely could not come to pass, 
and we have to ask now, How do we find the 
congruities of Nature preserved compatibly 
with the appointed evolution of humanity to 
the higher forms of existence which crown the 
edifice ? 

Just as childhood is irresponsible for its acts, 
the earlier races of humanity are irresponsible 
for theirs ; but there comes the period of full 
growth, when the complete development of the 
faculties which enable the individual man to 
choose between good and evil, in the single life 
with which he is for the moment concerned, en- 
ables the continuous Ego also to make its final 
selection. That period — that enormous period, 
for Nature is in no hurry to catch its creatures 
in a trap in such a matter as this — is barely 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 191 

yet beginning, and a complete round period 
around the seven worlds will have to be gone 
through before it is over. Until the middle of 
the fifth period is passed on this earth, the great 
question — to be or not to be for the future — 
is not irrevocably settled. We are coming 
now into the possession of the faculties which 
render man a fully responsible being, but we 
have yet to employ those faculties during the 
maturity of our Ego-hood in the manner which 
shall determine the vast consequences hereafter. 

It is during the first half of the fifth round 
that the struggle principally takes place. Till 
then, the ordinary course of life may be a good 
or a bad preparation for the struggle, but can- 
not fairly be described as the struggle itself. 
And now we have to examine the nature of the 
struggle, so far merely spoken of as the selec- 
tion between good and evil. That is in no 
way an inaccurate, but it is an incomplete, defi- 
nition. 

The ever-recurring and ever-threatened con- 
flict between intellect and spirituality is the 
phenomenon to be now examined. The com- 
monplace conceptions which these two words 
denote must of course be expanded to some 
extent before the occult conception is realized ; 
for European habits of thinking are rather apt 
to set up in the mind an ignoble image of spir- 



192 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ituality, as an attribute rather of the character 
than the mind itself, — a pale goody-goodiness, 
born of an attachment to religious ceremonial 
and of devout aspirations, no matter to what 
whimsical notions of Heaven and Divinity in 
which the " spiritually -minded " person may 
have been brought up. Spirituality, in the 
occult sense, has little or nothing to do with 
feeling devout ; it has to do with the capacity 
of the mind for assimilating knowledge at the 
fountain-head of knowledge itself — of absolute 
knowledge — instead of by the circuitous and 
laborious process of ratiocination. 

The development of pure intellect, the rati- 
ocinative faculty, has been the business of Eu- 
ropean nations for so long, and in this depart- 
ment of human progress they have achieved 
such magnificent triumphs, that nothing in oc- 
cult philosophy will be less acceptable to Euro- 
peans themselves at first, and while the ideas at 
stake are imperfectly grasped, than the first 
aspect of the occult theory concerning intellect 
and spirituality ; but this does not arise so 
much from the undue tendency of occult science 
to depreciate intellect as from the undue ten- 
dency of modern Western speculation to depre- 
ciate spirituality. Broadly speaking, so far 
Western philosophy has had no opportunity of 
appreciating spirituality ; it has not been made 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 193 

acquainted with the range of the inner faculties 
of man ; it has merely groped blindly in the 
direction of a belief that such inner faculties 
existed ; and Kant himself, the greatest modern 
exponent of that idea, does little more than 
contend that there is such a faculty as intuition, 
— if we only knew how to work with it. 

The process of working with it is occult sci- 
ence in its highest aspect, the cultivation of 
spirituality. The cultivation of mere power 
over the forces of Nature, the investigation of 
some of her subtler secrets as regards the inner 
principles controlling physical results, is occult 
science in its lowest aspect, and into that lower 
region of its activity mere physical science may, 
or even must, gradually run up. But the ac- 
quisition by mere intellect — physical science 
in excelsis — of privileges which are the proper 
appanage of spirituality is one of the dangers 
of that struggle which decides the ultimate 
destiny of the human Ego. For there is one 
thing which intellectual processes do not help 
mankind to realize, and that is the nature and 
supreme excellence of spiritual existence. On 
the contrary, intellect arises out of physical 
causes, the perfection of the physical brain, 
and tends only to physical results, the perfec- 
tion of material welfare. Although, as a con- 
cession to " weak brethren ' and lt religion," 

13 



194 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

on which it looks with good-humored contempt, 
modern intellect does not condemn spirituality, 
it certainly treats the physical human life as the 
only serious business with which grave men, or 
even earnest philanthropists, can concern them- 
selves. But obviously, if spiritual existence, 
vivid subjective consciousness, really does go on 
for periods greater than the periods of intellec- 
tual physical existence in the ratio, as we have 
seen in discussing the Devachanic condition, of 
80 to 1 at least, then surely man's subjective 
existence is more important than his physical 
existence, and intellect in error, when all its 
efforts are bent on the amelioration of the phys- 
ical existence. 

These considerations show how the choice be- 
tween good and evil — which has been made 
by the human Ego in the course of the great 
struggle between intellect and spirituality — is 
not a mere choice between ideas so plainly con- 
trasted as wickedness and virtue. It is not so 
rough a question as that, — whether man be 
wicked or virtuous, — which must really at the 
final critical turning-point decide whether he 
shall continue to live and develop into higher 
phases of existence, or cease to live altogether. 
The truth of the matter is (if it is not impru- 
dent at this stage of our progress to brush the 
surface of a new mystery) that the question, to 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 195 

be or not to be, is not settled by reference to 
the question whether a man be wicked or vir- 
tuous at all. It will plainly be seen eventually 
that there must be evil spirituality as well as 
good spirituality. So that the great question 
of continued existence turns altogether and of 
necessity on the question of spirituality, as com- 
pared with physicality. The point is not so 
much " shall a man live ; is he good enough to be 
permitted to live any longer? " as " can the man 
live any longer in the higher levels of existence 
into which humanity must at last evolve?" 
Has he qualified himself to live by the cultiva- 
tion of the durable portion of his nature ? If 
not, he has got to the end of his tether. The 
destiny which must befall him is annihilation, — 
not necessarily suffering in a conscious exist- 
ence, but that dissolution that must befall the 
soul which has wholly assimilated itself to 
matter. Into the eighth sphere of pure matter 
that Ego must descend which is finally con- 
victed of unfitness to go any further in the up- 
ward spiral path around the planetary chain. 

It need not be hurriedly supposed that occult 
philosophy considers vice and virtue of no con- 
sequence to human spiritual destinies, because 
it does not discover in Nature that these char- 
acteristics determine ultimate progress in evo- 
lution. No system is so pitilessly inflexible in 



196 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

its morality as the system which occult philos- 
ophy explores and expounds. But that which 
vice and virtue of themselves determine ,is 
happiness and misery, not the final problem of 
continued existence, beyond that immeasurably 
distant period, when in the progress of evolu- 
tion man has got to begin being something more 
than man, and cannot go on along the path of 
progress with the help only of the relatively 
lower human attributes. It is true again that 
one can hardly imagine virtue in any decided 
degree to fail in engendering, in due time, the 
required higher attributes ; but we should not 
be scientifically accurate in speaking of it as the 
cause of progress, in ultimate stages of eleva- 
tion, though it may provoke the development 
of that which is the cause of progress. 

This consideration — that ultimate progress 
is determined by spirituality irrespective of its 
moral coloring — is the great meaning of the oc- 
cult doctrine that "to be immortal in good one 
must identify one's self with God ; to be immor- 
tal in evil, with Satan. These are the two poles 
of the world of souls ; between these two poles 
vegetate and die without remembrance the use- 
less portion of mankind." l The enigma, like all 
occult formulas, has a lesser application (fitting 
the microcosm as well as the macrocosm), and 

1 Eliphas Levi. 



THE PRG9RESS OF HUMANITY. 197 

in its lesser significance refers to Devachan 
or Avitchi, and the blank destiny of colorless 
personalities ; but in its more important bear- 
ing it relates to the final sorting out of human- 
ity at the middle of the great fifth round, the 
annihilation of the utterly unspiritual Egos and 
the passage onward of the others to be immor- 
tal in good or immortal in evil. Precisely the 
same meaning attaches to the passage in Reve- 
lation (iii. 15, 16) : " I would thou wert cold 
or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, 
and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out 
of m} 7 mouth." 

Spirituality, then, is not devout aspiration; 
it is the highest kind of intellection, that which 
takes cognizance of the workings of Nature by 
direct assimilation of the mind with her higher 
principles. The objection which physical intel- 
ligence will bring against this view is that the 
mind can cognize nothing except by observation 
of phenomena and reasoning thereon. That is 
the mistake, — it can ; and the existence of oc- 
cult science is the highest proof thereof. But 
there are hints pointing in the direction of such 
proof all around us if we have but the patience 
to examine their true bearings. It is idle to 
say, in face, merely for one thing, of the phe- 
nomena of clairvoyance — crude and imperfect 
as those have been which have pushed them- 



198 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

selves on the attention of the world — that 
there are no other avenues to consciousness but 
those of the five senses. Certainly in the ordi- 
nary world the clairvoyant faculty is an exceed- 
ingly rare one, but it indicates the existence in 
mar: of a potential faculty, the nature of which, 
as inferred from its slightest manifestations, 
must obviously be capable in its highest devel- 
opment of leading to a direct assimilation of 
knowledge independently of observation. 

One of the most embarrassing difficulties that 
beset the present attempt to translate the es- 
oteric doctrine into plain language is due really 
to the fact that spiritual perceptiveness, apart 
from all ordinary processes by which knowledge 
is acquired, is a great and grand possibility of 
human nature. It is by that method in the 
regular course of occult training that adepts im- 
part instruction to their pupils. They awaken 
the dormant sense in the pupil, and through 
this they imbue his mind with a knowledge 
that such and such a doctrine is the real truth. 
The whole scheme of evolution, which the fore- 
going chapters have portrayed, infiltrates into 
the regular chela's mind by reason of the fact 
that he is made to see the process taking place 
by clairvoyant vision. There are no words 
used in his instruction at all. And adepts 
themselves, to whom the facts and processes of 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 199 

Nature are familiar as our five fingers to us, 
find it difficult to explain in a treatise which 
they cannot illustrate for us, by producing men- 
tal pictures in our dormant sixth sense, the com- 
plex anatomy of the planetary system. 

Certainly it is not to be expected that man- 
kind as yet should be generally conscious of 
possessing the sixth sense, for the day of its ac- 
tivity has not yet come. It has been already 
stated that each round in turn is devoted to the 
perfection in man of the corresponding princi- 
ple in its numerical order, and to its prepara- 
tion for assimilation with the next. The earlier 
rounds have been described as concerned with 
man in a shadowy, loosely organized, unintelli- 
gent form. The first principle of all, the body, 
was developed, but it was merely growing used 
to vitality, and was unlike anything we can 
now picture to ourselves. The fourth round, 
in which we are now engaged, is the round in 
which the fourth principle, will, desire, is fully 
developed, and in which it is engaged in assim- 
ilating itself with the fifth principle, reason, in- 
telligence. In the fifth round, the completely 
developed reason, intellect, or soul, in which 
the Ego then resides, must assimilate itself to 
the sixth principle, spirituality, or give up the 
business of existence altogether. 

All readers of Buddhist literature are famil- 



200 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

iar with the constant references made there to 
the Arhat's union of his soul with God. This, 
in other words, is the premature development 
of his sixth principle. He forces himself right 
up through all the obstacles which impede such 
an operation in the case of a fourth-round man, 
into that stage of evolution which awaits the 
rest of humanity — or rather so much of hu- 
manity as may reach it in the ordinary course 
of Nature — in the latter part of the fifth round. 
And in doing this, it will be observed, he tides 
himself right over the great period of danger, — 
the middle of the fifth round. That is the stu- 
pendous achievement of the adept as regards 
his own personal interests. He has reached the 
further shore of the sea in which so many of 
mankind will perish. He waits there in a con- 
tentment which people cannot even realize 
without some glimmerings of spirituality — of 
the sixth sense — themselves for the arrival 
there of his future companions. He does not 
wait in his physical body, let me hasten to add, 
to avoid misconstruction, but when at last priv- 
ileged to resign this, in a spiritual condition, 
which it would be foolish to attempt to describe, 
while even the Devachanic states of ordinary 
humanity are themselves almost beyond the 
reach of imaginations untrained in spiritual 
science. 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 201 

But, returning to the ordinary course of hu- 
manity and the growth into sixth-round people 
of men and women, who do not become adepts 
at any premature stage of their career, it will 
be observed that this is the ordinary course of 
Nature in one sense of the expression ; but so 
also is it the ordinary course of Nature for 
every grain of corn that is developed to fall 
into appropriate soil, and grow up into an ear 
of corn itself. All the same a great many 
grains do nothing of the sort, and a great many 
human Egos will never pass through the trials 
of the fifth round. The final effort of Nature 
in evolving man is to evolve from him a being 
unmeasurably higher to be a conscious agent, 
and what is ordinarily meant by a creative 
principle in Nature herself ultimately. The 
first achievement is to evolve free-will, and the 
next to perpetuate that free-will by inducing 
it to unite itself with the final purpose of Na- 
ture, which is good. In the course of such 
an operation it is inevitable that a great deal 
of the free-will evolved should turn to evil, 
and after producing temporary suffering be dis- 
persed and annihilated. More than this, the 
final purpose can only be achieved by a profuse 
expenditure of material ; and just as this goes 
on in the lower stages of evolution, where a 
thousand seeds are thrown off by a vegetable 



202 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

for every one that ultimately fructifies into a 
new plant, so are trie god-like germs of Will, 
sown one in each man's breast, in abundance 
like the seeds blown about in the wind. Is the 
justice of Nature to be impugned by reason of 
the fact that many of these germs will perish ? 
Such an idea could only rise in a mind that 
will not realize the room there is in Nature for 
the growth of every germ which chooses to 
grow, and to the extent it chooses to grow, be 
that extent great or small. If it seems to any 
one horrible that an "immortal soul" should 
perish, under any circumstances, that impres- 
sion can only be due to the pernicious habit of 
regarding everything as eternity, which is not 
this microscopic life. There is room in the 
subjective spheres and time in the catenary 
manvantara, before we even approach the 
Dhyan Chohan, or god-like period, for more 
than the ordinary brain has ever yet conceived 
of immortality. Every good deed and elevated 
impulse that every man or woman ever did or 
felt must reverberate through aeons of spirit- 
ual existence, whether the human entity con- 
cerned proves able or not to expand into the 
sublime and stupendous development of the 
seventh round. And it is out of the causes 
generated in one of our brief lives on earth 
that exoteric speculation conceives itself capa* 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 203 

ble of constructing eternal results ! Out of 
such a seven or eight hundredth part of our 
objective life on earth during the present stay 
here of the evolutionary life-wave, we are to 
expect Nature to discern sufficient reason for 
deciding upon our whole subsequent career. In 
truth, Nature will make such a large return for 
a comparatively small expenditure of human 
will-power in the right direction that, extrav- 
agant as the expectation just stated may ap- 
pear, and extravagant as it is applied to or- 
dinary lives, one brief existence may sometimes 
suffice to anticipate the growth of milliards of 
years. The adept may, in the one earth-life, 1 
achieve so much advancement that his sub- 
sequent growth is certain, and merely a matter 
of time ; but then the seed germ which pro- 
duces an adept in our life, must be very per- 
fect to begin with, and the early conditions of 
its growth favorable, and withal the effort on 
the part of the man himself, life-long and far 
more concentrated, more intense, more arduous, 
than it is possible for the uninitiated outsider 
to realize. In ordinary cases, the life which is 
divided between material enjoyment and spir- 
itual aspiration — however sincere and beau- 
tiful the latter — can only be productive of 

1 In practice, my impression is that this is rarely achieved in 
one earth-life ; approached rather in two or three artificial incarna- 
tions. 



204 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

a correspondingly duplex result, of a spiritual 
reward in Devachan, of a new birth on eartji. 
The manner in which the adept gets above 
the necessity of such a new birth is perfectly 
scientific and simple, be it observed, though 
it sounds like a theological mystery when ex- 
pounded in exoteric writings by reference to 
Karma and Skandhas, Trishna, and Tanha, 
and so forth. The next earth-life is as much 
a consequence of affinities engendered by the 
fifth principle, the continuous human soul, as 
the Devachan ic experiences which come first 
are the growth of the thoughts and aspirations 
of an elevated character, which the person con- 
cerned has created during life. That is to sa} r , 
the affinities engendered in ordinary cases are 
partly material, partly spiritual. Therefore 
they start the soul on its entrance into the 
world of effects with a double set of attractions 
inhering in it ; one set producing the subjective 
consequences of its Devachanic life, the other 
set asserting themselves at the close of that 
Jife, and carrying the soul back again into re- 
incarnation. But if the person during his ob- 
jective life absolutely develops no affinities for 
material existence, starts his soul at death with 
all its attractions tending one way in the direc- 
tion of spirituality, and none at all drawing it 
back to objective life, it does not come back; 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 205 

it mounts into a condition of spirituality, cor- 
responding to the intensity of the attractions 
or affinities in that direction, and the other 
thread of connection is cut off. 

Now this explanation does not entirely cover 
the whole position, because the adept himself, 
no matter how high, does return to incarna- 
tion eventually, after the rest of mankind have 
passed across the great dividing period in the 
middle of the fifth round. Until the exaltation 
of Planetary Spirithood is reached, the highest 
human soul must have a certain affinity for 
earth still, though not the earth-life of phys- 
ical enjoyments and passions that we are go- 
ing through. But the important point to re- 
alize in regard to the spiritual consequences of 
earthly life is that, in so large a majority of 
cases that the abnormal few need not be talked 
about, the sense of justice in regard to the 
destiny of good men is amply satisfied by the 
course of Nature step by step as time advances. 
The spirit-life is ever at hand to receive, re- 
fresh, and restore the soul after the struggles, 
achievements, or sufferings of incarnation. And 
more than this, reserving the question about 
eternity, Nature, in the intercyclic periods at 
the apex of each round, provides for all man- 
kind, except those unfortunate failures who 
have persistently adhered to the path of evil, 



206 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

great intervals of spiritual blessedness, far 
longer and more exalted in their character 
than the Devachanic periods of each separate 
life. Nature, in fact, is inconceivably liberal 
and patient to each and all her candidates for 
the final examination during their long prep- 
aration for this. Nor is one failure to pass 
even this final examination absolutely fatal. 
The failures may try again, if they are not 
utterly disgraceful failures, but they must wait 
for the next opportunity. 

A complete explanation of the circumstances 
under which such waiting is accomplished 
would not come into the scheme of this trea- 
tise ; but it must not be supposed that candi- 
dates for progress, self-convicted of unfitness to 
proceed at the critical period of the fifth round, 
fall necessarily into the sphere of annihilation. 
For that attraction to assert itself, the Ego must 
have developed a positive attraction for matter, 
a positive repulsion for spirituality, which is 
overwhelming in its force. In the absence of 
such affinities, and in the absence also of such 
affinities as would suffice to tide the Ego over 
the great gulf, the destiny which meets the 
mere failures of Nature is, as regards the pres- 
ent planetary manwantara, to die, as Eliphas 
Levi puts it, without remembrance. They 
hav? lived their life, and had their share of 



THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 207 

Heaven, but they are not capable of ascending 
the tremendous altitudes of spiritual progress 
then confronting them. But they are qualified 
for further incarnation and life on the planes of 
existence to which they are accustomed. They 
will wait, therefore, in the negative spiritual 
state they have attained till those planes of ex- 
istence are again in activity in the next plan- 
etary manivantara. The duration of such wait- 
ing is, of course, beyond the reach of imagina- 
tion altogether, and the precise nature of the 
existence which is now contemplated is no less 
unrealizable ; but the broad pathway through 
that strange region of dreamy semi-animation 
must be taken note of in order that the sym- 
metry and completeness of the whole evolution- 
ary scheme may be perceived. 

And with this last contingency provided for, 
the whole scheme does lie before the reader in 
its main outlines with tolerable completeness. 
We have seen the one life, the spirit, animat- 
ing matter in it lowest forms first, and evoking 
growth by slow degrees into higher forms. In- 
dividualizing itself at last in man, it works up 
through inferior and irresponsible incarnations 
until it has penetrated the higher principles, 
and evolved a true human soul, which is thence- 
forth the master of its own fate, though guarded 
in the beginning by natural provisions which 



208 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

debar it from premature shipwreck, which stim- 
ulate and refresh it on its course. But the ulti- 
mate destiny offered to that soul is to develop 
not only into a being capable of taking care of 
itself, but into a being capable of taking care 
also of others, of presiding over and directing, 
within what may be called constitutional limits, 
the operations of Nature herself. Clearly be- 
fore the soul can have earned the right to that 
promotion, it must have been tried by having 
conceded to it full control over its own affairs. 
That full control necessarily conveys the power 
to shipwreck itself. The safeguards put round 
the Ego in its youth — its inability to get into 
higher or lower states than those of interm lin- 
dane Devachan and Avitchi — fall from it in 
its maturity. It is potent, then, over its own 
destinies, not only in regard to the development 
of transitory joy and suffering, but in regard to 
the stupendous opportunities in both directions 
which existence opens out before it. It may 
seize on the higher opportunities in two ways ; 
it may throw up the struggle in two ways ; it 
may attain sublime spirituality for good or sub- 
lime spirituality for evil ; it may ally itself to 
physically for (not evil but for) utter annihila- 
tion ; or, on the other hand, for (not good but 
for) the negative result of beginning the educa* 
tional processes of incarnation all over again. 



CHAPTER IX. 

BUDDHA. 

The historical Buddha, as known to the cus- 
todians of the Esoteric Doctrine, is a personage 
whose birth is not invested with the quaint 
marvels popular story has crowded round it. 
Nor was his progress to adeptship traced by the 
literal occurrence of the supernatural struggles 
depicted in symbolic legend. On the other 
hand, the incarnation, which may outwardly be 
described as the birth of Buddha, is certainly 
not regarded by occult science as an event like 
any other birth, nor the spiritual development 
through which Buddha passed during his earth- 
life a mere process of intellectual evolution, 
like the mental history of any other philoso- 
pher. The mistake which ordinary European 
writers make in dealing with a problem of this 
sort lies in their inclination to treat exoteric 
legend either as a record of a miracle about 
which no more need be said, or as pure myth, 
putting merely a fantastic decoration on a re- 
markable life. This, it is assumed, however 

14 



210 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

remarkable, must have been lived according to 
the theories of Nature at present accepted by 
the nineteenth century. The account which 
has now been given in the foregoing pages may 
prepare the way for a statement as to what the 
Esoteric Doctrine teaches concerning the real 
Buddha, who was born, as modern investigation 
has quite correctly ascertained, 643 years be- 
fore the Christian era, at Kapila-Vastu near 
Benares. 

Exoteric conceptions, knowing nothing of the 
laws which govern the operations of Nature in 
her higher departments, can only explain an 
abnormal dignity attaching to some particular 
birth by supposing that the physical body of 
the person concerned was generated in a mirac- 
ulous manner. Hence the popular notion about 
Buddha, that his incarnation in this world was 
due to an immaculate conception. Occult sci- 
ence knows nothing of any process for the pro- 
duction of a physical human child other than 
that appointed by physical laws ; but it does 
know a good deal concerning the limits within 
which the progressive " one life," or "spiritual 
monad," or continuous thread of a series of in- 
carnations, may select definite child-bodies as 
their human tenements. By the operation of 
Karma, in the case of ordinary mankind, this 
selection is made, unconsciously as far as the 



BUDDHA. 211 

antecedent, spiritual Ego emerging from De- 
vachan is concerned. But in those abnormal 
cases where the one life has already forced it- 
self into the sixth principle — that is to say, 
where a man has become an adept, and has the 
power of guiding his own spiritual Ego, in full 
consciousness as to what he is about, after he 
has quitted the body in which he won adept- 
ship, either temporarily or permanently — it is 
quite within his power to select his own next 
incarnation. During life, even, he gets above 
the Devachanic attraction. He becomes one of 
the conscious directing powers of the planetary 
system to which he belongs ; and great as this 
mystery of selected re-incarnation may be, it is 
not by any means restricted in its application 
to such extraordinary events as the birth of a 
Buddha. It is a phenomenon frequently repro- 
duced by the higher adepts to this day, and 
while a great deal recounted in popular Ori- 
ental mythology is either purely fictitious or 
entirely symbolical, the re-incarnation of the 
Dalai and Teshu Lamas in Tibet, at which 
travelers only laugh for want of the knowledge 
that might enable them to sift fact from fancy, 
is a sober scientific achievement. In such cases 
the adept states beforehand in what child, when 
and where to be born, he is going to re-incar- 
nate, and he very rarely fails. We say very 



212 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

rarely, because there are some accidents of phys- 
ical nature which cannot be entirely guarded 
against ; and it is not absolutely certain that, 
with all the foresight even an adept may bring 
to bear upon the matter, the child he may choose 
to become, in his re-incarnated state, may attain 
physical maturity successfully. And, mean- 
while, in the body, the adept is relatively help- 
less. Out of the body he is just what he has 
been ever since he became an adept ; but as 
regards the new body he has chosen to inhabit, 
he must let it grow up in the ordinary course of 
Nature, and educate it by ordinary processes, 
and initiate it by the regular occult method 
into adeptship, before he has got a body fully 
ready again for occult work on the physical 
plane. All these processes are immensely sim- 
plified, it is true, by the peculiar spiritual force 
working within ; but at first, in the child's body, 
the adept soul is certainly cramped and embar- 
rassed, and, as ordinary imagination might sug- 
gest, very uncomfortable and ill at ease. The 
situation would be very much misunderstood if 
the reader were to imagine that re-incarnation 
of the kind described is a privilege which adepts 
avail themselves of with pleasure. 

Buddha's birth was a mystery of the kind 
described, and by the light of what has been 
said it will be easy to go over the popular story 



BUDDHA. 213 

of his miraculous origin, and trace the symbolic 
references to the facts of the situation in some 
even of the most grotesque fables. None, for 
example, can look less promising as an allu- 
sion to anything like a scientific fact than the 
statement that Buddha entered the side of his 
mother as a young white elephant. But the 
white elephant is simply the symbol of adept- 
ship, — something considered to be a rare and 
beautiful specimen of its kind. So with other 
ante-natal legends pointing to the fact that the 
future child's body had been chosen as the hab- 
itation of a great spirit already endowed with 
superlative wisdom and goodness. Indra and 
Brahma came to do homage to the child at his 
birth ; that is to say, the powers of Nature 
were already in submission to the Spirit within 
him. The thirty-two signs of a Buddha, which 
legends describe by means of a ludicrous phys- 
ical symbolism, are merely the various powers 
of adeptship. 

The selection of the body known as Siddhar- 
tha, and afterwards as Gautama, son of Sud- 
dhodana, of Kapila-Vastu, as the human tene- 
ment of the enlightened human spirit, who had 
submitted to incarnation for the sake of teach- 
ing mankind, was not one of those rare failures 
spoken of above ; on the contrar} 7 , it was a 
signally successful choice in all respects, and 



214 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

nothing interfered with the accomplishment 
of adeptship by the Buddha in his new body. 
The popular narrative of his ascetic struggles 
and temptations, and of his final attainment 
of Buddhahood under the Bo-tree, is nothing 
more, of course, than the exoteric version of his 
initiation. 

From that period onward, his work was of a 
dual nature ; he had to reform and revive the 
morals of the populace and the science of the 
adepts, — for adeptship itself is subject to cyclic 
changes, and in need of periodical impulses. 
The explanation of this branch of the subject, 
in plain terms, will not alone be important for 
its own sake, but will be interesting to all stu- 
dents of exoteric Buddhism, as elucidating some 
of the puzzling complications of the more ab- 
struse " Northern doctrine." 

A Buddha visits the earth for each of the 
seven races of the great planetary period. The 
Buddha with whom we are occupied was the 
fourth of the series, and that is why he stands 
fourth in the list quoted by Mr. Rhys Davids, 
from Burnouf, — quoted as an illustration of 
the way the Northern doctrine has been, as Mr. 
Davids supposes, inflated by metaphysical sub- 
tleties and absurdities crowded round the sim- 
ple morality which sums up Buddhism as pre- 
sented to the populace. The fifth, or Maitreya 



BUDDHA. 215 

Buddha, will come after the final disappear- 
ance of the fifth race, and when the sixth race 
will already have been established on earth 
for some hundreds of thousands of years. The 
sixth will come at the beginning of the seventh 
race, and the seventh towards the close of that 
race. 

This arrangement will seem, at the first 
glance, out of harmony with the general design 
of human evolution. Here we are in the mid- 
dle of the fifth race, and yet it is the fourth 
Buddha who has been identified with this race, 
and the fifth will not come till the fifth race is 
practically extinct. The explanation is to be 
found, however, in the great outlines of the 
esoteric cosmogony. At the beginning of each 
great planetary period, when obscuration comes 
to an end, and the human tide-wave in its prog- 
ress round the chain of worlds arrives at the 
shore of a globe where no humanity has existed 
for milliards of years, a teacher is required from 
the first for the new crop of mankind about to 
spring up. Remember that the preliminary 
evolution of the mineral, vegetable, and animal 
kingdoms has been accomplished in preparation 
for the new round period. With the first infu- 
sion of the life-current into the " missing link " 
species the first race of the new series will begin 
to evolve. It is then that the Being, who may 



216 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

be considered the Buddha of the first race, ap- 
pears. The planetary spirit, or Dhyan Cho- 
han, who is — or, to avoid the suggestion of an 
erroneous idea by the use of a singular verb, 
let us defy grammar and say, who are — Bud- 
dha in all his or their developments, incarnates 
among the young, innocent, teachable forerun- 
ners of the new humanity, and impresses the 
first broad principles of right and wrong and 
the first truths of the esoteric doctrine on a suf- 
ficient number of receptive minds to insure the 
continued reverberation of the ideas so im- 
planted through successive generations of men 
in the millions of years to come, before the first 
race shall have completed its course. It is this 
advent in the beginning of the round period of 
a Divine Being in human form that starts the 
ineradicable conception of the anthropomorphic 
God in all exoteric religions. 

The first Buddha of the series in which Gau- 
tama Buddha stands fourth is thus the second 
incarnation of Avaloketiswara, — the mystic 
name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans, or 
planetary spirits, belonging to our planetary 
chain ; and though Gautama is thus the fourth 
incarnation of enlightenment by exoteric reck- 
oning, he is really the fifth of the true series, 
and thus properly belonging to our fifth race. 

Avaloketiswara, as just stated, is the mystin 



BUDDHA. 217 

name of the hosts of the Dhyan Chohans ; the 
proper meaning of the word is manifested wis- 
dom, just as Addi-Buddha and Amitabha both 
mean abstract wisdom. 

The doctrine, as quoted by Mr. Davids, that 
" every earthly mortal Buddha has his pure and 
glorious counterpart in the mystic world, free 
from the debasing conditions of this material 
life, or rather that the Buddha under material 
conditions is only an appearance, the reflection, 
or emanation, or type of a Dhyani Buddha," is 
perfectly correct. The number of Dhyani Bud- 
dhas, or Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits, 
perfected human spirits of former world periods, 
is infinite, but only five are practically identified 
in exoteric and seven in esoteric teaching ; and 
this identification, be it remembered, is a man- 
ner of speaking which must not be interpreted 
too literally, for there is a unity in the sublime 
spirit-life in question that leaves no room for 
the isolation of individuality. All this will be 
seen to harmonize perfectly with the revelations 
concerning Nature embodied in previous chap- 
ters, and need not in any way be attributed to 
mystic imaginings. The Dhyani Buddhas, or 
Dhyan Chohans, are the perfected humanity of 
previous Manwantaric epochs, and their collec- 
tive intelligence is described by the name " Addi- 
Buddha," which Mr. Rhys Davids is mistaken 



218 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

in treating as a comparatively recent invention 
of the Northern Buddhish. Addi-Buddha means 
primordial wisdom, and is mentioned in the 
oldest Sanskrit books. For example, in the phil- 
osophical dissertation on the " Mandnkya Upan- 
ishad," by Gowdapatha, a Sanskrit author con- 
temporary with Buddha himself, the expression 
is freely used and expounded in exact accord- 
ance with the present statement. A friend of 
mine in India, a Brahmin pundit of first-rate 
attainments as a Sanskrit scholar, has shown 
me a copy of this book, which has never yet, 
that he knows of, been translated into English, 
and has pointed out a sentence bearing on the 
present question, giving me the following trans- 
lation : " Prakriti itself, in fact, is Addi-Buddha, 
and all the Dharmas have been existing from 
eternity." Gowdapatha is a philosophical wri- 
ter respected by all Hindu and Buddhist sects 
alike, and widely known. He was the guru, or 
spiritual teacher of the first Sankaracharya, of 
whom I shall have to speak more at length 
very shortly. 

Adeptship, when Buddha incarnated, was not 
the condensed, compact hierarchy that it has 
since become under his influence. There has 
never been an age of the world without its 
adepts ; but they have sometimes been scat- 
tered throughout the world ; they have some* 



BUDDHA. 219 

times been isolated in separate seclusions ; they 
have gravitated now to this country, now to 
that ; and finally, be it remembered, their 
knowledge and power has not always been 
inspired with the elevated and severe morality 
which Buddha infused into its latest and high- 
est organization. The reform of the occult 
world by his instrumentality was, in fact, the 
result of his great sacrifice ; of the self-denial 
which induced him to reject the blessed condi- 
tion of Nirvana to which, after his earth-life as 
Buddha, he was fully entitled, and undertake 
the burden of renewed incarnations in order to 
carry out more thoroughly the task he had 
taken in hand, and confer a correspondingly 
increased benefit on mankind. Buddha re-in- 
carnated himself, next after his existence as 
Gautama Buddha, in the person of the great 
teacher of whom but little is said in exoteric 
works on Buddhism, but without a considera- 
tion of whose life it would be impossible to 
get a correct conception of the position in the 
Eastern world of esoteric science, — namely, 
Sankaracharya. The latter part of this name, 
it may be explained — acharya — merely means 
teacher. The whole name as a title is perpet- 
uated to this day under curious circumstances, 
but the modern bearers of it are not in the 
direct line of Buddhist spiritual incarnations. 



220 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Sankaracharya appeared in India — no atten- 
tion being paid to his birth, which appears to 
have taken place on the Malabar coast — about 
sixty years after Gautama Buddha's death. 
Esoteric teaching is to the effect that Sankara- 
charya simply was Buddha in all respects, in a 
new body. This view will not be acceptable to 
uninitiated Hindu authorities, who attribute a 
later date to Sankaracharya's appearance, and 
regard him as a wholly independent teacher, 
even inimical to Buddhism, but none the less 
is the statement just made the real opinion of 
initiates in esoteric science, whether these call 
themselves Buddhists or Hindus. I have re- 
ceived the information I am now giving from a 
Brahmin Adwaiti, of Southern India, — not 
directly from my Tibetan instructor, — and all 
initiated Brahmins, he assures me, would say 
the same. Some of the later incarnations of 
Buddha are described differently as overshad- 
owings by the spirit of Buddha, but in the per- 
son of Sankaracharya he reappeared on earth. 
The object he had in view was to fill up some 
gaps and repair certain errors in his own pre- 
vious teaching ; for there is no contention in 
esotoric Buddhism that even a Buddha can be 
absolutely infallible at every moment of his 
career. 

The position was as follows : Up to the time 



BUDDHA. 221 

of Buddha, the Brahmins of India had jeal- 
ously reserved occult knowledge as the appan- 
age of their own caste. Exceptions were oc- 
casionally made in favor of Tshatryas, but the 
rule was exclusive in a very high degree. This 
rule Buddha broke down, admitting all castes 
equally to the path of adeptship. The change 
may have been perfectly right in principle, but 
it paved the way for a great deal of trouble, 
and as the Brahmins conceived for the degrada- 
tion of occult knowledge itself ; that is to say, 
its transfer to unworthy hands, — not unworthy 
merely because of caste inferiority, but because 
of the moral inferiority which they conceived 
to be introduced into the occult fraternity, to- 
gether with brothers of low birth. The Brah- 
min contention would not by any means be 
that because a man should be a Brahmin it fol- 
lowed that he was necessarily virtuous and 
trustworthy ; but the argument would be : It is 
supremely necessary to keep out all but the vir- 
tuous and trustworthy from the secrets and 
powers of initiation. To that end it is neces- 
sary not only to set up all the ordeals, proba- 
tions, and tests we can think of, but also to 
take no candidates except from the class which, 
on the whole, by reason of its hereditary advan- 
tages, is likely to be the best nursery of fit can- 
didates. 



222 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Later experience is held on all hands now to 
have gone far towards vindicating the Brah- 
min apprehension, and the next incarnation of 
Buddha, after that in the person of Sankara- 
charya, was a practical admission of this ; but 
meanwhile, in the person of Sankaracharya, 
Buddha was engaged in smoothing over, before- 
hand, the sectarian strife in India which be saw 
impending. The active opposition of the Brah- 
mins against Buddhism began in Asoka's time, 
when the great efforts made by that ruler to 
spread Buddhism provoked an apprehension on 
their part in reference to their social and polit- 
ical ascendency. It must be remembered that 
initiates are not wholly free in all cases from 
the prejudices of their own individualities. 
They possess some such god-like attributes that 
outsiders, when they first begin to understand 
something of these, are apt to divest them, in 
imagination, even too completely of human 
frailties. Initiation and occult knowledge held 
in common is certainly a bond of union among 
adepts of all nationalities, which is far stronger 
than any other bond. But it has been found 
on more occasions than one to fail in obliterat- 
ing all other distinctions. Thus the Buddhist 
and Brahmin initiates of the period referred to 
were by no means of one mind on all questions, 
and the Brahmins very decidedly disapproved 



BUDDHA. 223 

o^ the Buddhist reformation in its exoteric as- 
pects. Chandragupta, Asoka's grandfather, was 
an upstart, and the family were Sudras. This 
was enough to render his Buddhist policy unat- 
tractive to the representatives of the orthodox 
Brahmin faith. The struggle assumed a very 
embittered form, though ordinary history gives 
us few or no particulars. The party of primi- 
tive Buddhism was entirely worsted, and the 
Brahmin ascendency completely reestablished 
in the time of Vikramaditya, about 80 B. c. 
But Sankaracharya had traveled all over India 
in advance of the great struggle, and had estab- 
lished various mathams, or schools of philoso- 
phy, in several important centres. He was 
only engaged in this task for a few years, but 
the influence of his teaching has been so stu- 
pendous that its very magnitude disguises the 
change wrought. He brought exoteric Hindu- 
ism into practical harmony with the esoteric 
" wisdom religion," and left the people amus- 
ing themselves still with their ancient mytholo- 
gies, but leaning on philosophical guides who 
were esoteric Buddhists to all intents and pur- 
poses, though in reconciliation .with all that 
was ineradicable in Brahmanism. The great 
fault of previous exoteric Hinduism lay in its 
attachment to vain ceremonial and its adhesion 
to idolatrous conceptions of the divinities of the 



224 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Hindu pantheon. Sankaracharya emphasized, 
by his commentaries on the Upanishads, and by 
his original writings, the necessity of pursuing 
gnyanam in order to obtain mohsha ; that is 
to say, the importance of the secret knowledge 
to spiritual progress, and the consummation 
thereof. He was the founder of the Vedantin 
system, — the proper meaning of Vedanta being 
the final end or crown of knowledge, — though 
the sanctions of that system are derived by 
him from the writings of Vyasa, the author of 
the " Mahabharata," the " Puranas," and the 
" Brahmasntras." I make these statements, 
the reader will understand, not on the basis of 
any researches of my own, — which I am not 
Oriental scholar enough to attempt, — but on the 
authority of a Brahmin initiate who is himself a 
first-rate Sanskrit scholar as well as an occultist. 
The Vedantin school at present is almost co- 
extensive with Hinduism, making allowance, of 
course, for the existence of some special sects 
like the Sikhs, the Vallabacharyas, or Mahara- 
jah sect, of very unfair fame, and may be di- 
vided into three great divisions, — the Adwai- 
tees, the Vishishta Adwaitees, and the Dwaitees. 
The outline of the Adwaitee doctrine is that 
brakmum or purush, the universal spirit, acts 
only through prakriti, matter ; that everything 
takes place in this way through the inherent 



BUDDHA. 225 

energy of matter. Brahinum, or Parabrahm, is 
thus a passive, incomprehensible, unconscious 
principle, but the essence, one life, or energy 
of the universe. In this way the doctrine is 
identical with the transcendental materialism of 
the adept esoteric Buddhist philosophy. The 
name Adwaitee signifies not dual, and has 
reference partly to the non-dualit}^ or unity 
of universal spirit, or Buddhist one life, as 
distinguished from the notion of its operation 
through anthropomorphic emanations ; partly 
to the unity of the universal and the human 
spirit. As a natural consequence of this doc- 
trine, the Adwaitees infer the Buddhist doctrine 
of Karma, regarding the future destin} 7 of man 
as altogether depending on the causes he him- 
self engenders. 

The Vishishta Adwaitees modify these views 
by the interpolation of Vishnu as a conscious 
deity, the primary emanation of Parabrahm, 
Vishnu being regarded as a personal god, capa- 
ble of intervening in the course of human des- 
tiny. They do not regard yog, or spiritual 
training, as the proper avenue to spiritual 
achievement, but conceive this to be possible 
chiefly by means of Bhakti, or devoutness. 
Roughly stated in the phraseology of European 
theology, the Adwaitee may thus be said to be- 
lieve only in salvation by works, the Vishishta 

15 



226 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Adwaitee in salvation by grace. The Dwaitee 
differs but little from the Vishishta Adwaitee, 
merely affirming, by the designation he as- 
sumes, with increased emphasis, the duality of 
the human spirit and the highest principle of 
the universe, and including many ceremonial 
observances as an essential part of Bhakti. 

But all these differences of view, it must be 
borne in mind, have to do merely with the ex- 
oteric variations on the fundamental idea, intro- 
duced by different teachers with varying im- 
pressions as to the capacity of the populace for 
assimilating transcendental ideas. All lead- 
ers of Vedantin thought look up to Sankara- 
charya and the Mathams he established with 
the greatest possible reverence, and their inner 
faith runs up in all cases into the one esoteric 
doctrine. In fact, the initiates of all schools in 
India interlace with one another. Except as 
regards nomenclature, the whole system of cos- 
mogony as held by the Buddhist-Arhats, and as 
set forth in this volume, is equally held by in- 
itiated Brahmins, and has been equally held 
by them since before Buddha's birth. Whence 
did they obtain it? the reader may ask. Their 
answer would be, From the Planetary Spirit, or 
Dhyan Chohan, who first visited this planet at 
the dawn of the human race in the present 
round period, — more millions of years ago than 



BUDDHA. 227 

I like to mention on the basis of conjecture, 
while the real exact number is withheld. 

Sankaracharya founded four principal Math- 
ams : one at Sringari, in Southern India, which 
has always remained the most important ; one 
at Juggernath, in Orissa ; one at Dwaraka, in 
Kathiawar ; and one at Gungotri, on the slopes 
of the Himalayas in the North. The chief of 
the Sringari temple has always borne the desig- 
nation Sankaracharya, in addition to some in- 
dividual name. From these four centres others 
have been established, and Mathams now exist 
all over India, exercising the utmost possible 
influence on Hinduism. 

I have said that Buddha, by his third in- 
carnation, recognized the fact that he had, in 
the excessive confidence of his loving trust in 
the perfectibility of humanity, opened the doors 
of the occult sanctuary too widely. His third 
appearance was in the person of Tsong-ka-pa, 
the great Tibetan adept reformer of the four- 
teenth centuty. In this personality he was 
exclusively concerned with the affairs of the 
adept fraternity, by that time collecting chiefly 
in Tibet. 

From time immemorial there had been a cer- 
tain secret region in Tibet, which to this day 
is quite unknown to and unapproachable by 
any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to 



228 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

the ordinary people of the country as to any 
others, in which adepts have always congre- 
gated. But the country generally was not in 
Buddha's time, as it has since become, the 
chosen habitation of the great brotherhood. 
Much more than they are at present were the 
Mahatraas in former times distributed about 
the world. The progress of civilization, en- 
gendering the magnetism they find so trying, 
had, however, by the date with which we are 
now dealing — the fourteenth century — al- 
ready given rise to a very general movement 
towards Tibet on the part of the previously 
dissociated occultists. Far more widely than 
was held to be consistent with the. safety of 
mankind was occult knowledge and power then 
found to be disseminated. To the task of put- 
ting it under the control of a rigid system of 
rule and law did Tsong-ka-pa address himself. 

Without reestablishing the system on the 
previous unreasonable basis of caste exclusive- 
ness, he elaborated a code of rules for the guid- 
ance of the adepts, the effect of which was to 
weed out of the occult body all but those who 
sought occult knowledge in a spirit of the most 
sublime devotion to the highest moral prin- 
ciples. 

An article in the " Theosophist " for March, 
1882, on " Re-incarnations in Tibet," for the com- 



BUDDHA. 229 

plete trustworthiness of which in all its mystic 
bearings I have the highest assurance, gives a 
great deal of important information about the 
branch of the subject with which we are now 
engaged, and the relations between esoteric Bud- 
dhism and Tibet, which cannot be examined too 
closely by any one who desires an exhaustive 
comprehension of Buddhism in its real signifi- 
cation. 

" The regular system ," we read, " of the 
Lamaic incarnations of ' Sangyas ' (or Buddha) 
began with Tsong-kha-pa. This reformer is 
not the incarnation of one of the five celestial 
Dhyans, or heavenly Buddhas, as is generally 
supposed, said to have been created by Sakya 
Muni after he had risen to Nirvana, but that of 
Amita, one of the Chinese names for Buddha. 
The records preserved in the Gon-pa (lamasery) 
of Tda-shi Hlum-po (spelt by the English Teshu 
Lumbo) show that Sangyas incarnated himself 
in Tsong-kha-pa, in consequence of the great 
degradation his doctrines had fallen into. Until 
then there had been no other incarnations than 
those of the five celestial Buddhas and of their 
Buddhisatvas, each of the former having cre- 
ated (read overshadowed with his spiritual wis- 
dom) five of the last named. ... It was be- 
cause, among many other reforms, Tsong-kha-pa 
forbade necromancy (which is practiced to this 



230 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

day, with the most disgusting rites, by fbe 
Bhons, — the aborigines of Tibet, with whom 
the Red Caps, or Shammars, had always fra- 
ternized) that the latter resisted his authority. 
This act was followed by a split between the 
two sects. Separating entirely from the Gya- 
lukpas, the Dugpas (Red Caps), from the first 
in a great minority, settled in various parts of 
Tibet, chiefly its borderlands, and principally 
in Nepaul and Bhootan. But, while they re- 
tained a sort of independence at the monastery 
of Sakia-Djong, the Tibetan residence of their 
spiritual (?) chief, Gong-sso Rimbo-chay, the 
Bhootanese have been from their beginning the 
tributaries and vassals of the Dalai Lamas. 

" The Tda - shi Lamas were always more 
powerful and more highly considered than the 
Dalai Lamas. The latter are the creation of 
the Tda-shi Lama, Nabang-lob-sang, the sixth 
incarnation of Tsong-kha-pa, himself an incar- 
nation of Amitabha, or Buddha." 

Several writers on Buddhism have enter- 
tained a theory, which Mr. Clements Mark- 
ham formulates very fully in his " Narrative of 
the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet," that 
whereas the original scriptures of Buddhism 
were taken to Ceylon by the son of Asoka, the 
Buddhism, which found its way into Tibet 
from India and China, was gradually overlaid 



BUDDHA. 231 

with a mass of dogma and metaphysical spec- 
ulation. And Professor Max Miiller says : 
" The most important element in the Buddhist 
reform has always been its social and moral 
code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral 
code, taken by itself, is one of the most perfect 
which the world has ever known ; and it was 
this blessing that the introduction of Buddhism 
brought into Tibet." 

" The blessing," says the authoritative article 
in the " Theosophist," from which I have just 
been quoting, " has remained and spread all 
over the country, there being no kinder, purer- 
minded, more simple or sin-fearing nation than 
the Tibetans. But for all that, the popular la- 
maism, when compared with the real esoteric 
or Arahat Buddhism of Tibet, offers a contrast 
as great as the snow trodden along a road in 
the valley, to the pure and undefiled mass 
which glitters on the top of a high mountain 
peak." 

The fact is that Ceylon is saturated with 
exoteric, and Tibet with esoteric, Buddhism. 
Ceylon concerns itself merely or mainly with 
the morals, Tibet, or rather the adepts of Tibet, 
with the science, of Buddhism. 

These explanations constitute but a sketch of 
the whole position. I do not possess the argu- 
ments nor the literary leisure which would be 






232 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

required for its amplification into a finished pic- 
ture of the relations which really subsist between 
the inner principles of Hinduism and those of 
Buddhism. And I am quite alive to the pos- 
sibility that many learned and painstaking stu- 
dents of the subject will have formed, as the 
consequences of prolonged and erudite research, 
conclusions with which the explanations I am 
now enabled to give may seem at first sight to 
conflict. But none the less are these expla- 
nations directly gathered from authorities to 
whom the subject is no less familiar in its schol- 
arly than in its esoteric aspect. And their 
inner knowledge throws a light upon the whole 
position which wholly exempts them from the 
danger of misconstruing texts and mistaking 
the bearings of obscure symbology. To know 
when Gautama Buddha was born, what is re- 
corded of his teaching, and what popular leg- 
ends have gathered round his biography is to 
know next to nothing of the real Buddha, so 
much greater than either the historical moral 
teacher or the fantastic demi-god of tradition. 
And it is only when we have comprehended the 
link between Buddhism and Brahmanism that 
the greatness of the esoteric doctrine rises into 
its true proportions. 



CHAPTER X. 

NIRVANA. 

A COMPLETE assimilation of esoteric teach- 
ing up to the point we have now reached will 
enable us to approach the consideration of the 
subject which exoteric writers on Buddhism 
have generally treated as the doctrinal starting- 
point of that religion. 

Hitherto, for want of any better method of 
seeking out the true meaning of Nirvana, Bud- 
dhist scholars have generally picked the word 
to pieces, and examined its roots and fragments. 
One might as hopefully seek to ascertain the 
smell of a flower by dissecting the paper on 
which its picture was painted. It is difficult 
for minds schooled in the intellectual processes 
of physical research — as all our Western nine- 
teenth-century minds are, directly or indirectly 
— to comprehend the first spiritual state above 
this life, that of Devachan. Such conditions of 
existence are but partly for the understanding ; 
a higher faculty must be employed to realize 
them ; and all the more is it impossible to force 



234 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

their meaning upon another mind bywords. It 
is by first awakening that higher faculty in his 
pupil, and then putting the pupil in a position 
to observe for himself, that the regular occult 
teacher proceeds in such a matter. 

Now there are the usual seven states of Dev- 
achan, suited to the different degrees of spirit- 
ual enlightenment which the various candidates 
for that condition may obtain ; there are rupa 
and arupa locas in Devachan, — that is to say, 
states which take (subjective) consciousness of 
form, and states which transcend these again. 
And yet the highest Devachanic state in arupa 
loca is not to be compared to that wonderful 
condition of pure spirituality which is spoken of 
as Nirvana. 

In the ordinary course of Nature during a 
round, when the spiritual monad has accom- 
plished the tremendous journey from the first 
planet to the seventh, and has finished for the 
time being its existence there, — finished all its 
multifarious existences 'there, with their respec- 
tive periods of Devachan between each, — the 
Ego passes into a spiritual condition different 
from the Devachanic state, in which, for pe- 
riods of inconceivable duration, it rests before 
resuming its circuit of the worlds. That condi- 
tion may be regarded as the Devachan of its 
Devachanic states, — a sort of review thereof,— 



NIRVANA. 235 

a superior state to those reviewed, just as the 
Devachanic state belonging to any one exist- 
ence on earth is a superior state to that of the 
half-developed spiritual aspirations or impulses 
of affection of the earth-life. That period — 
that intercyclic period of extraordinary exalta- 
tion, as compared to any that have gone before, 
as compared even with the subjective conditions 
of the planets in the ascending arc, so greatly 
superior to our own as these are — is spoken 
of in esoteric science as a state of partial Nir- 
vana. Carrying on imagination through im- 
measurable vistas of the future, we must next 
conceive ourselves approaching the period which 
would correspond to the intercyclic period of 
the seventh round of humanity, in which men 
have become as gods. The very last most ele- 
vated and glorious of the objective lives having 
been completed, the perfected spiritual being 
reaches a condition in which a complete recol- 
lection of all lives lived at any time in the past 
returns to him. He can look back over the 
curious masquerade of objective existences, as 
it will seem to him then, over the minutest de- 
tails of any of these earth-lives among the 
number through which he has passed, and can 
take cognizance of them and of all things with 
which they were in any way associated ; for in 
regard to this planetary chain he has reached 



236 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

omniscience. This supreme development of 
individuality is the great reward which Nature 
reserves not only for those who secure it pre- 
maturely, so to speak, by the relatively brief 
but desperate and terrible struggles which lead 
to adeptship, but also for all who by the dis- 
tinct preponderance of good over evil in the 
character of the whole series of their incar- 
nations have passed through the valley of the 
shadow of death in the middle of the fifth 
round, and have worked their way up to it in 
the sixth and seventh rounds. 

This sublimely blessed state is spoken of in 
esoteric science as the threshold of Nirvana. 

Is it worth while to go any further in specu- 
lation as to what follows ? One may be told 
that no state of individual consciousness, even 
though but a phase of feeling already identified 
in a large measure with the general conscious- 
ness on that level of existence, can be equal in 
spiritual elevation to absolute consciousness in 
which all sense of individuality is merged in the 
whole. We may use such phrases as intellect- 
ual counters, but for no ordinary mind — dom- 
inated by its physical brain and brain-born in- 
tellect — can they have a living signification. 

All that words can convey is that Nirvana is 
a sublime state of conscious rest in omniscience. 
It would be ludicrous, alter all that has gone 



NIRVANA. 237 

before, to turn to the various discussions which 
have been carried on by students of exoteric 
Buddhism as to whether Nirvana does or does 
not mean annihilation. Worldly similes fall 
short of indicating the feeling with which the 
graduates of esoteric science regard such a ques- 
tion. Does the last penalty of the law mean 
the highest honor of the peerage ? Is a wooden 
spoon the emblem of the most illustrious pre- 
eminence in learning ? Such questions as these 
but faintly symbolize the extravagance of the 
question whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism 
to be equivalent to annihilation. And in some, 
to us inconceivable, way the state of para-Nir- 
vana is spoken of as immeasurably higher than 
that of Nirvana. I do not pretend myself to 
attach any meaning to the statement, but it 
may serve to show to what a very transcenden- 
tal realm of thought the subject belongs. 

A great deal of confusion of mind respecting 
Nirvana has arisen from statements made con- 
cerning Buddha. He is said to have attained 
Nirvana while on earth ; he is also said to have 
foregone Nirvana in order to submit to renewed 
incarnations for the good of humanity. The 
two statements are quite reconcilable. As a 
great adept, Buddha naturally attained to that 
which is the great achievement of adeptship on 
earth, - — the passing of his own Ego-spirit into 



238 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

the ineffable condition of Nirvana. Let it not 
be supposed that for any adept such a passage 
is one that can be lightly undertaken. Only 
stray hints about the nature of this great mys- 
tery have reached me, but putting these to- 
gether I believe I am right in saying that the 
achievement in question is one which only some 
of the high initiates are qualified to attempt, 
which exacts a total suspension of animation in 
the body for periods of time compared to which 
the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary 
science are insignificant, the protection of the 
physical frame from natural decay during this 
period by means which the resources of occult 
science are strained to accomplish ; and withal 
it is a process involving a double risk to the 
continued earthly life of the person who un- 
dertakes it. One of these risks is the doubt 
whether, when once Nirvana is attained, the 
Ego will be willing to return. That the return 
will be a terrible effort and sacrifice is certain, 
and will only be prompted by the most devoted 
attachment on the part of the spiritual traveler 
to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction. 
The second great risk is that, allowing the sense 
of duty to predominate over the temptation to 
stay, — a temptation, be it remembered, that is 
not weakened by the notion that any conceivable 
penalty can attach to it, — even then it is al- 



NIRVANA. 239 

ways doubtful whether the traveler will be able 
to return. In spite of all this, however, there 
have been many other adepts besides Buddha 
who have made the great passage, and for 
whom, those about them at such times have 
said, the return to their prison of ignoble flesh 
— though so noble ex hypothesi compared to 
most such tenements — has left them paralyzed 
with depression for weeks. To begin the weary 
round of physical life again, to stoop to earth 
after having been in Nirvana, is too dreadful 
a collapse. 

Buddha's renunciation was in some inexpli- 
cable manner greater, again, because he not 
merely returned from Nirvana for duty's sake, 
to finish the earth-life in which he was engaged 
as Gautama Buddha, but when all the claims 
of duty had been- fully satisfied, and his right 
of passage into Nirvana, for incalculable aeons 
entirely earned under the most enlarged view 
of his earthly mission, he gave up that reward, 
or rather postponed it for an indefinite period, 
to undertake a supererogatory series of incarna- 
tions, for the sake of humanity at large. How 
is humanity being benefited by this renuncia- 
tion ? it may be asked. But the question can 
only be suggested in reality by that deep-seated 
habit, we have most of us acquired, of estimat- 
ing benefit by a physical standard, and even 



240 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

in regard to this standard of taking very short 
views of human affairs. No one will have fol- 
lowed me through the foregoing chapter on the 
Progress of Humanity without perceiving what 
kind of benefit it would be that Buddha would 
wish to confer on men. That which is neces- 
sarily for him the great question in regard to 
humanity is how to help as many people as pos- 
sible across the great critical period of the fifth 
round. 

Until that time everything is a mere prepa- 
ration for the supreme struggle, in the estima- 
tion of an adept, all the more of a Buddha. 
The material welfare of the existing generation 
is not even as dust in the balance in such a cal- 
culation ; the only thing of importance at pres- 
ent is to cultivate those tendencies in mankind 
which may launch as many Egos as possible 
upon such a Karmic path that the growth of 
their spirituality in future births will be pro- 
moted. Certainly it is the fixed conviction of 
esoteric teachers — of the adept co-workers with 
Buddha — that the veiy process of cultivating 
such spirituality will immensely reduce the sum 
of even transitory human sorrow. And the 
happiness of mankind, even in any one gener- 
ation only, is by no means a matter on which 
esoteric science looks with indifference. So the 
esoteric policy is not to be considered as some- 



NIRVANA. 241 

thing so hopelessly up in the air that it will 
never concern any of us who are living now. 
But there are seasons of good and bad harvest 
for wheat and barley, and so also for the de- 
sired growth of spirituality amongst men ; and 
in Europe, at all events, going by the experi- 
ence of former great races, at periods of devel- 
opment corresponding to that of our own now, 
the great present uprush of intelligence in the 
direction of physical and material progress is 
not likely to bring on a season of good harvests 
for progress of the other kind. For the mo- 
ment the best chance of doing good in coun- 
tries where the uprush referred to is most 
marked is held to lie in the possibility that 
the importance of spirituality may come to be 
perceived by intellect, even in advance of be- 
ing felt, if the attention of that keen though 
unsympathetic tribunal can but be secured. 
Any success in that direction to which these 
explanations may conduce will justify the views 
of those — but a minority™ among the esoteric 
guardians of humanity who have conceived that 
it is worth while to have them made. 

So Nirvana is truly the keynote of esoteric 
Buddhism, as of the hitherto rather misdirected 
studies of external scholars. The great end of 
the whole stupendous evolution of humanity is 
to cultivate human souls so that they shall be 

16 



242 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ultimately fit for that as yet inconceivable Con- 
dition. The great triumph of the present race 
of planetary spirits who have reached that con- 
dition themselves will be to draw thither as 
many more Egos as possible. We are far as 
yet from the era at which we may be in serious 
danger of disqualifying ourselves definitively 
for such progress, but it is not too soon even 
now to begin the great process of qualification ; 
all the more as the Karma, which will prop- 
agate itself through successive lives in that 
direction, will carry its own reward with it, so 
that an enlightened pursuit of our highest in- 
terests in the very remote future will coincide 
with the pursuit of our immediate welfare in 
the next Devachanic period, and the next re- 
birth. 

Will it be argued that if the cultivation of 
spirituality is the great purpose to be followed, 
it matters little whether men pursue it along 
one religious pathway or another ? This is the 
mistake which, as explained in a former chap- 
ter, Buddha as Sankaracharya set himself es- 
pecially to combat, — namely, the early Hindu 
belief that moksha can be attained by bhakti 
irrespective of gnyanam ; that is, that salva- 
tion is obtainable by devout practices irrespec- 
tive of knowledge of eternal truth. The sort 
of salvation we are talking about now is not 



NIRVANA. 243 

escape from a penalty, to be achieved by cajol- 
ing a celestial potentate ; it is a positive and 
not a negative achievement, — the ascent into 
regions of spiritual elevation so exalted that 
the candidate aiming at them is claiming that 
which we ordinarily describe as omniscience. 
Sorely it is plain, from the way Nature habit- 
ually works, that under no circumstances will 
a time ever come when a person, merely by 
reason of having been good, will suddenly be- 
come wise. The supreme goodness and ivisdom 
of the sixth-round man, who, once becoming 
that, will assimilate by degrees the attributes 
of divinity itself, can only be grown by degrees 
themselves ; and goodness alone, associated as 
we so often find it with the most grotesque re- 
ligious beliefs, cannot conduct a man to more 
than Devachanic periods of devout but unin- 
telligent rapture, and in the end, if similar con- 
ditions are reproduced through many existences, 
to some painless extinction of individuality at 
the great crisis. 

It is by a steady pursuit of and desire for 
real spiritual truth, not by an idle, however 
well-meaning acquiescence in the fashionable 
dogmas of the nearest church, that men launch 
their souls into the subjective state, prepared 
to imbibe real knowledge from the latent om- 
niscience of their own sixth principles, and to 



244 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

re-incarnate in due time with impulses in the 
same direction. Nothing can produce more 
disastrous effects on human progress as regards 
the destiny of individuals than the very preva- 
lent notion that one religion, followed out in a 
pious spirit, is as good as another, and that if 
such and such doctrines are perhaps absurd 
when you look into them, the great majority of 
good people will never think of their absurdity, 
but will* recite them in a blamelessly devoted 
attitude of mind. One religion is by no means 
as good as another, even if all were productive 
of equally blameless lives. But I prefer to 
avoid all criticism of specific faiths, leaving this 
volume a simple and inoffensive statement of 
the real inner doctrines of the one great re- 
ligion of the world which — presenting as it 
does in its external aspects a bloodless and in- 
nocent record — has thus been really produc- 
tive of blameless lives throughout its whole 
existence. Moreover, it would not be by a ser- 
vile acceptance even of its doctrines that the 
development of true spirituality is to be culti- 
vated. It is by the disposition to seek truth, to 
test and examine all which presents itself as 
claiming belief, that the great result is to be 
brought about. In the East, such a resolution 
in the highest degree leads to chelaship, to the 
pursuit of truth, knowledge, by the develop. 



NIRVANA. 245 

ment of inner faculties by means of which it 
may be cognized with certainty. In the West, 
the realm of intellect, as the world is mapped 
out at present, truth unfortunately can only be 
pursued and hunted out with the help of many 
words and much wrangling and disputation. 
But at all events it may be hunted, and, if it is 
not finally captured, the chase on the part of 
the hunters will have engendered instincts that 
will propagate themselves and lead to results 
hereafter. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE UNIVEBSE. 

In all Oriental literature bearing on the con- 
stitution of all the cosmos, frequent reference 
is made to the days and the nights of Brahma ; 
the inbreathings and the outbreathings of the 
creative principle, the periods of manvantara 1 
and the periods of pralaya. This idea runs 
into various Eastern mythologies, but in its 
symbolical aspects we need not follow it here. 
The process in Nature to which it refers is of 
course the alternate succession of activity and 
repose that is observable at every step of the 
great ascent from the infinitely small to the in- 
finitely great. Man has a manvantara and pra- 
laya every four-and-twenty hours, his periods 
of waking and sleeping ; vegetation follows the 
same rule from year to year as it subsides and 
revives with the seasons. The world too has its 



1 As transliterated into English, this word may be written either 
manwantara or manvantara ; and the proper pronunciation is 
something between the two, with the accent on the second sylla- 
ble. 



THE UNIVERSE. 24JI 

manvantaras and pralayas, when the tide-wave 
of humanity approaches its shore, runs through 
the evolution of its seven races, and ebbs away 
again ; and such a manvantara has been treated 
by most exoteric religions as the whole cycle of 
eternity. 

The major manvantara of our planetary 
chain is that which comes to an end when the 
last Dhyan Chohan of the seventh round of 
perfected humanity passes into Nirvana. And 
the expression has thus to be regarded as one 
of considerable elasticity. It may be said in- 
deed to have infinite elasticity, and that is one 
explanation of the confusion which has reigned 
in all treatises on Eastern religions in their pop- 
ular aspects. All the root-words transferred to 
popular literature from the secret doctrine have 
a seven-fold significance, at least for the initiate, 
while the uninitiated reader, naturally suppos- 
ing that one word means one thing, and trying 
always to clear up its meaning by collating its 
various applications, and striking an average, 
gets into the most hopeless embarrassment. 

The planetary chain with which we are con- 
cerned is not the only one which has our sun 
as its centre. As there are other planets be- 
sides the Earth in our chain, so there are other 
chains besides this in our solar system. There 
are seven such, and there comes a time when 



248 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

all these go into pralaya together. This is 
spoken of as a solar pralaya, and within the 
interval between two such pralayas the vast 
solar manvantara covers seven pralayas and 
manvantaras of our — and each other — plan- 
etary chain. Thought is baffled, say even the 
adepts, in speculating as to how many of our 
solar pralayas must come before the great cos- 
mic night in which the whole universe, in its 
collective enormity, obeys what is manifestly 
the universal law of activity and repose, and 
with all its myriad systems passes itself into 
pralaya. But even that tremendous result, 
says esoteric science, must surely come. 

After the pralaya of a single planetary chain 
there is no necessity for a recommencement of 
evolutionary activity absolutely de novo. There 
is only a resumption of arrested activity. The 
vegetable and animal kingdoms, which at the 
end of the last corresponding manvantara had 
reached only a partial development, are not 
destroyed. Their life or vital energy passes 
through a night or period of rest ; they also 
have, so to speak, a Nirvana of their own, as 
why should they not, these foetal and infant en- 
tities ? They are all like ourselves, begotten of 
the one element. As we have our Dhyan Cho- 
hans, so have they, in their several kingdoms, 
elemental guardians, and are as well taken care 



THE UNIVERSE. 249 

of in the mass as humanity is in the mass. The 
one element not only fills space and is space, 
but interpenetrates every atom of cosmic mat- 
ter. 

When, however, the hour of the solar pralaya 
strikes, though the process of man's advance on 
his last seventh round is precisely the same as 
usual, each planet, instead of merely passing 
out of the visible into the invisible, as he quits 
it in turn, is annihilated. With the beginning 
of the seventh round of the seventh planetary 
chain manvantara, every kingdom having now 
reached its last cycle, there remains on each 
planet, after the exit of man, merely the maya 
of once living and existing forms. With everv 
step he takes on the descending and ascending 
arcs, as he moves on from globe to globe the 
planet left behind becomes an empty chrysa- 
loidal case. At his departure there is an out- 
flow from every kingdom of its entities. Wait- 
ing to pass into higher forms in due time, they 
are nevertheless liberated, and to the day of the 
next evolution they will rest in their lethargic 
sleep in space, until brought into life again at 
the new solar manvantara. The old elementals 
will rest till they are called on to become in 
their turn the bodies of mineral, vegetable, and 
animal entities on another and a higher chain of 
globes on their way to become human entities, 



250 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

while the germinal entities of the lowest forms 
— and at that time there will remain but few 
of such — will hang in space, like drops of 
water suddenly turned into icicles. They will 
thaw at the first hot breath of the new solar 
manvantara, and form the soul of the future 
globes. The slow development of the vegeta- 
ble kingdom, up to the period we are now deal- 
ing with, will have been provided for by the 
longer interplanetary rest of man. When the 
solar pralaya comes, the whole purified human- 
ity merges into Nirvana, and from that inter- 
solar Nirvana will be reborn in the higher sys- 
tems. The strings of worlds are destroyed, 
and vanish like a shadow from the wall when 
the light is extinguished. " We have every 
indication," say the adepts, " that at this very 
moment such a solar pralaya is taking place, 
while there are two minor ones ending some- 
where." 

At the beginning of the solar manvantara 
the hitherto subjective elements of the material 
worlds, now scattered in cosmic dust, receiving 
their impulse from the new Dhyan Chohans of 
the new solar system (the highest of the old 
ones having gone higher) will form into pri- 
mordial ripples of life, and, separating into dif- 
ferentiating centres of activity, combine in a 
graduated scale of seven stages of evolution. 



THE UNIVERSE. 251 

Like every other orb of space, our earth has, be- 
fore obtaining its ultimate materiality, to pass 
through a gamut of seven stages of density. 
Nothing in this world now can give us an idea 
of what an ultimate stage of materiality is like. 
The French astronomer Flammarion, in a book 
called " La Resurrection et la Fin des Mondes," 
has approached a conception of this ultimate 
materiality. The facts are, I am informed, 
with slight modifications, much as he surmises. 
In consequence of what he treats as secular re- 
frigeration, but which more truly is old age 
and loss of vital power, the solidification and 
desiccation of the earth at last reaches a point 
when the whole globe becomes a relaxed con- 
glomerate. Its period of child-bearing has gone 
by ; its progeny are all nurtured ; its term of 
life is finished. Hence its constituent masses 
cease to obey those laws of cohesion and aggre- 
gation which held them together. And becom- 
ing like a corpse, which, abandoned to the work 
of destruction, leaves each molecule composing 
it free to separate itself from the body, and 
obey in future the sway of new influences, " the 
attraction of the moon," suggests M. Flamma- 
rion, " would itself undertake the task of demo- 
lition by producing a tidal wave of earth parti- 
cles instead of an aqueous tide." This last idea 
must not be regarded as countenanced by oc- 



252 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

cult science except so far as it may serve' to 
illustrate the loss of molecular cohesion in the 
material of the earth. 

Occult physics pass fairly into the region of 
metaphysics, if we seek to obtain some indica- 
tion of the way in which evolution recommences 
after a universal pralaya. 

The one eternal, imperishable thing in the 
universe, which universal pralayas themselves 
pass over without destroying, is that which 
may be regarded indifferently as space, dura- 
tion, matter, or motion ; not as something hav- 
ing these four attributes, but as something 
which is these four things at once, and always. 
And evolution takes its rise in the atomic po- 
larity which motion engenders. In cosmogony 
the positive and the negative, or the active and 
passive, forces correspond to the male and fe- 
male principles. The spiritual efflux enters 
into the veil of cosmic matter ; the active is 
attracted by the passive principle, and if we 
may here assist imagination by having recourse 
to old occult symbology, the great Nag, the 
serpent emblem of eternity, attracts its tail to 
its mouth, forming thereby the circle of eter- 
nity, or rather cycles in eternity. The one 
and chief attribute of the universal spiritual 
principle, the unconscious but ever active life- 
giver, is to expand and shed ; that of the uni- 



THE UNIVERSE. 253 

versal material principle is to gather in and 
fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when 
separate, they become consciousness and life 
when brought together. The word Brahma 
comes from the Sanskrit root brih, to expand, 
grow, or fructify, esoteric cosmogony being but 
the vivifying expansive force of Nature in its 
eternal revolution. No one expression can have 
contributed more to mislead the human mind 
in basic speculation concerning the origin of 
things than the word "creation." Talk of cre- 
ation and we are continually butting against the 
facts. But once realize that our planet and our- 
selves are no more creations than an iceberg, but 
states of being for a given time, — that their 
present appearance, geological and anthropolog- 
ical, are transitory and but a condition concom- 
itant of that stage of evolution at which they 
have arrived, — and the way has been prepared 
for correct thinking. Then we are enabled to 
see what is meant by the one and only princi- 
ple or element in the universe, and by the treat- 
ment of that element as androgynous ; also by 
the proclamation of Hindu philosophy that all 
things are but maya, transitory states, except 
the one element which rests during the maha- 
pralayas only, — the nights of Brahma. 

Perhaps we have now plunged deeply enough 
into the fathomless mystery of the great First 



254 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

Cause. It is no paradox to say that simply 
by reason of ignorance do ordinan r theologians 
think they know so much about God. And it 
is no exaggeration to say that the wondrously 
endowed representatives of occult science, whose 
mortal nature has been so far elevated and 
purified that their perceptions range over other 
worlds and other states of existence, and com- 
mune directly with beings as much greater 
than ordinary mankind as man is greater than 
the insects of the field, — it is the mere truth, 
that they never occupy themselves at all with 
any conception remotely resembling the God of 
churches and creeds. Within the limits of the 
solar system, the mortal adept knows, of his 
own knowledge, that all things are accounted 
for by law, working on matter in its diverse 
forms, plus the guiding and modifying influence 
of the highest intelligences associated with the 
solar system, the Dhyan Chohans, the perfected 
humanity of the last preceding manvantara. 
These Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits, on 
whose nature it is almost fruitless to ponder 
until one can at least realize the nature of dis- 
embodied existence in one's own case, impart 
to the reawakening worlds at the end of a 
planetary chain pralaya such impulses that ev- 
olution feels them throughout its whole prog- 
ress. The limits of Nature's great law restrain 



THE UNIVERSE. 255 

their action. They cannot say, Let there be 
paradise throughout space, let all men be born 
supremely wise and good ; they can only work 
through the principle of evolution, and they 
cannot deny to any man who is to be invested 
with the potentiality of development himself 
into a Dhyan Chohan the right to do evil if 
he prefers that to good. Nor can they prevent 
evil, if done, from producing suffering. Ob- 
jective life is the soil in which the life-germs 
are planted ; spiritual existence (the expression 
being used, remember, in contrast merely to 
grossly material existence) is the flower to be 
ultimately obtained. But the human germ is 
something more than a flower-seed ; it has lib- 
erty of choice in regard to growing up or grow- 
ing down, and it could not be developed with- 
out such liberty being exercised by the plant. 
This is the necessity of evil. But within the 
limits that logical necessity prescribes, the 
Dhyan Chohan impresses his conceptions upon 
the evolutionary tide, and comprehends the ori- 
gin of all that he beholds. 

Surely as we ponder in this way over the 
magnitude of the cyclic evolution with which 
esoteric science is in this way engaged, it seems 
reasonable to postpone considerations as to the 
origin of the whole cosmos. The ordinary man 
in this earth-life, with certainly some hundred 



256 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

many earth-lives to come, and then very much 
many important inter-incarnation periods (more 
important, that is, as regards duration and the 
prospect of happiness or sorrow) also in pros- 
pect, may surely be most wisely occupied with 
the inquiries whose issue will affect practical 
results than witli speculation in which he is 
practically quite uninterested. Of course from 
the point of view of religious speculation rest- 
ing on no positive knowledge of anything be- 
yond this life, nothing can be more important 
or more highly practical than conjectures as to 
the attributes and probable intentions of the 
personal, terrible Jehovah, pictured as an om- 
nipotent tribunal into whose presence the soul 
at its death is to be introdaced for judgment. 
But scientific knowledge of spiritual things 
throws back the day of judgment into a very 
dim perspective, the intervening period being 
filled with activity of all kinds. Moreover, it 
shows mankind that certainly, for millions and 
millions of centuries to come, it will not be con- 
fronted with any judge at all, other than that 
all-pervading judge, that seventh principle, or 
universal spirit, which exists everywhere, and, 
operating on matter, provokes the existence of 
man himself, and the world in which he lives, 
and the future conditions towards which he is 
pressing. The seventh principle, undefinable, 



TEE UNIVERSE. 257 

incomprehensible for us at our present stages 
of enlightenment, is of course the only God 
recognized by esoteric knowledge, and no per- 
sonification of this can be otherwise than sym- 
bolical. 

And yet in truth esoteric knowledge, giving 
life and reality to ancient symbolism in one 
direction as often as it conflicts with modern 
dogma in the other, shows us how far from 
absolutely fabulous are even the most anthro- 
pomorphic notions of Deity associated by ex- 
oteric tradition with the beginning of the world. 
The planetary spirit, actually incarnated among 
men in the first round, was the prototype of 
personal Deity in all subsequent developments 
of the idea. The mistake made by uninstructed 
men in dealing with the idea is merely one of 
degree. The personal God of an insignificant 
minor manvantara has been taken for the Cre- 
ator of the whole cosmos, — a most natural mis- 
take for people forced, by knowing no more of 
human destiny than was included in one ob- 
jective incarnation, to suppose that all beyond 
was a homogeneous spiritual future. The God 
of this life, of course, for them, was the God of 
all lives and worlds and periods. 

The reader will not misunderstand me, I 
trust, to mean that esoteric science regards the 
planetary spirit of the first round as a god. 
17 



258 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

As I say, it is concerned with the working of 
Nature in an immeasurable space, from an im- 
measurable past, and all through immeasurable 
future. The enormous areas of time and space 
in which our solar system operates is explor- 
able by the mortal adepts of esoteric science. 
Within those limits they know all that takes 
place and how it takes place, and they know 
that everything is accounted for by the con- 
structive will of the collective host of the 
planetary spirits, operating under the law of ev- 
olution that pervades all Nature. They com- 
mune with these planetary spirits, and learn 
from them that the law of this is the law of 
other solar systems as well, into the regions of 
which the perceptive faculties of the planetary 
spirits can plunge, as the perceptive faculties 
of the adepts themselves can plunge into the 
life of other planets of this chain. The law 
of alternating activity and repose is operating 
universally ; for the whole cosmos, even though 
at unthinkable intervals, pralaya must succeed 
manvantara, and manvantara pralaya. 

Will any one ask, To what end does this 
eternal succession work? It is better to con- 
fine the question to a single system, and ask, To 
what end does the original nebula arrange itself 
in planetary vortices of evolution, and develop 
worlds in which the universal spirit, reverber- 



THE UNIVERSE. 259 

ating through matter, produces form and life 
and those higher states of matter in which that 
which we call subjective or spiritual existence 
is provided for ? Surely it is end enough to sat- 
isfy any reasonable mind that such sublimely 
perfected beings as the planetary spirits them- 
selves come thus into existence, and live a con- 
scious life of supreme knowledge and felicity 
through vistas of time which are equivalent to 
all we can imagine of eternity. Into this un- 
utterable greatness every living thing has the 
opportunity of passing ultimately. The spirit 
which is in every animated form, and which 
has even worked up into these from forms 
we are generally in the habit of calling inan- 
imate, will slowly but certainly progress on- 
wards until the working of its untiring influence 
in matter has evolved a human soul. It does 
not follow that the plants and animals around 
us have any principle evolved in them as yet 
which will assume a human form in the course 
of the present manvantara; but though the 
course of an incomplete revolution may be sus- 
pended by a period of natural repose, it is not 
rendered abortive. Eventually every spiritual 
monad, itself a sinless unconscious principle, 
will work through conscious forms on lower 
levels, until these, throwing off one after an- 
other higher and higher forms, will produce that 



260 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

in which the God-like consciousness may be 
fully evoked. Certainly it is not by reason of 
the grandeur of any human conceptions as to 
what would be an adequate reason for the ex- 
istence of the universe that such a consumma- 
tion can appear an insufficient purpose, not even 
if the final destiny of the planetary spirit him- 
self, after periods to which his development 
from the mineral forms of primeval worlds is but 
a childhood in the recollection of the man, is to 
merge his glorified individuality into that sum 
total of all consciousness, which esoteric meta- 
physics treat as absolute consciousness, which 
is non-consciousness. These paradoxical expres- 
sions are simply counters representing ideas that 
the human mind is not qualified to apprehend, 
and it is waste of time to haggle over them. 

These considerations supply the key to eso- 
teric Buddhism, a more direct outcome of the 
universal esoteric doctrine than any other pop- 
ular religion ; for the effort in its construction 
has been to make men love virtue for its own 
sake and for its good effect on their future 
incarnations, not to keep them in subjection 
to any priestly system or dogma by terrifying 
their fancy with the doctrine of a personal 
judge waiting to try them for more than their 
lives at their death. Mr. Lillie is mistaken, 
admirable as his intention has been, and sym« 



THE UNIVERSE. 261 

pathetic as his mind evidently is with the beau- 
tiful morality and aspiration of Buddhism, in 
deducing from its temple ritual the notion of a 
personal God. No such conception enters into 
the great esoteric doctrine of Nature, of which 
this volume has furnished an imperfect sketch. 
Nor even in reference to the farthest regions of 
the immensity beyond our own planetary sys- 
tem does the adept exponent of the esoteric 
doctrine tolerate the adoption of an agnostic 
attitude. It will not suffice for him to say, 
"As far as the elevated senses of planetary 
spirits, whose cognition extends to the outer- 
most limits of the starry heavens, — as far as 
their vision can extend Nature is self-sufficing ; 
as to what may lie beyond we offer no hypoth- 
esis." What the adept really says on this head 
is, " The universe is boundless, and it is a stul- 
tification of thought to talk of any hypothesis 
setting in beyond the boundless, — on the other 
side of the limits of the limitless." 

That which antedates every manifestation of 
the universe, and would lie beyond the limit of 
manifestation, if such limit could ever be found, 
is that which underlies the manifested universe 
within our own purview, — matter animated 
by motion, its parabrahm, or spirit. Matter, 
space, motion, and duration constitute one and 
the same eternal substance of the universe. 



262 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

There is nothing else eternal absolutely. That 
is the first state of matter, itself perfectly un- 
cognizable by physical senses, which deal witlji 
manifested matter, another state altogether. 
But though thus, in one sense of the word, ma- 
terialistic, the esoteric doctrine, as any reader 
of the foregoing explanations will have seen, is 
as far from resembling the gross narrow-minded 
conception of Nature, which ordinarily goes by 
the name of materialism, as the north pole 
looks away from the south. It stoops to ma- 
terialism, as it were, to link its methods with 
the logic of that system, and ascends to the 
highest realms of idealism to embrace and ex- 
pound the most exalted aspirations of spirit. 
As it cannot be too frequently or earnestly re- 
peated, it is the union of science with Religion, 
— the bridge by which the most acute and cau- 
tious pursuers of experimental knowledge may 
cross over to the most enthusiastic devotee, by 
means of which the most enthusiastic devotee 
may return to earth and yet keep heaven still 
around him. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 

Long familiarity with the esoteric doctrine 
will alone give rise to a full perception of the 
manner in which it harmonizes with facts of 
Nature such as we are all in a position to ob- 
serve. But something may be done to indi- 
cate the correspondences that may be traced 
between the whole body of teaching now set 
forth and the phenomena of the world around 
us. 

Beginning with the two great perplexities of 
ordinary philosophy, — the conflict between free- 
will and predestination and the origin of evil, — 
it will surely be recognized that the system 
of Nature now explained enables us to deal 
with those problems more boldly than they have 
ever yet been handled. Till now the most pru- 
dent thinkers have been least disposed to pro- 
fess that either by the aid of metaphysics or 
religion could the mystery of free-will and 
predestination be unraveled. The tendency of 
thought has been to relegate the whole enigma 



264 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

to the region of the unknowable. And strange 
to say this has been done contentedly by peo- 
ple who have been none the less contented to 
accept as more than a provisional hypothesis 
the religious doctrines which thus remained in- 
capable of reconciliation with some of their 
own most obvious consequences. The omnis- 
cience of a personal Creator, ranging over the 
future as well as the past, left man no room to 
exercise the independent authority over his 
own destinies, which nevertheless it was ab- 
solutely necessary to allow him to exercise in 
order that the policy of punishing or rewarding 
him for his acts in life could be recognized as 
anything but the most grotesque injustice. One 
great English philosopher, frankly facing the 
embarrassment, declared in a famous posthu- 
mous essay that by reason of these considera- 
tions it was impossible that God could be all- 
good and all-potent. People were free to in- 
vest him logically with one or other of these 
attributes, but not with both. The argument 
was treated with the respect due to the great 
reputation of its author, and put aside with the 
discretion due to respect for orthodox tenets. 

But the esoteric doctrine comes to our rescue 
in this emergency. First of all it honestly takes 
into account the insignificant size of this world 
compared to the universe. This is a fact of 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 265 

Nature, which the early Christian church feared 
with a true instinct, and treated with the 
cruelty of terror. The truth was denied, and 
its authors were tortured for many centuries. 
Established at last beyond even the authority 
of papal negations, the church resorted to the 
"desperate expedient," to quote Mr. Rhys 
Davids' phrase, of pretending that it did not 
matter. 

The pretense till now has been more success- 
ful than its authors could have hoped. When 
they dreaded astronomical discovery, they were 
crediting the world at large with more remorse- 
less logic than it ultimately showed any in- 
clination to employ. People have been found 
willing, as a rule, to do that which I have de- 
scribed esoteric Buddhism as not requiring us 
to do, — to keep their science and their relig- 
ion in separate water-tight compartments. So 
long and so thoroughly has this principle been 
worked upon that it has finally ceased to be 
an argument against the credibility of a relig- 
ious dogma to point out that it is impossible. 
But when we establish a connection between 
our hitherto divided reservoirs and require 
them to stand at the same level, we cannot 
fail to see how the insignificance of the earth's 
magnitude diminishes in a corresponding pro- 
portion the plausibility of theories that require 



266 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

us to regard the details of our own lives' as 
part of the general stock of a universal Crea- 
tor's omniscience. On the contrary, it is un- 
reasonable to suppose that the creatures inhab- 
iting one of the smaller planets of one of the 
smaller suns in the ocean of the universe, where 
suns are but water-drops in the sea, are exempt 
in any way from the general principle of gov- 
ernment by law. But that principle cannot co- 
exist with government by caprice, which is an 
essential condition of such predestination as 
conventional discussions of the problems before 
us associate with the use of the word. For, 
be it observed that the predestination which 
conflicts with free-will is not the predestina- 
tion of races, but individual predestination, 
associated with the ideas of divine grace or 
wrath. The predestination of races, under laws 
analogous to those which control the general 
tendency of any multitude of independent 
chances, is perfectly compatible with individual 
free-will, and thus it is that the esoteric doc- 
trine reconciles the long-standing contradiction 
of Nature. Man has control over his own des- 
tiny within constitutional limits, so to speak ; 
he is perfectly free to make use of his natural 
rights as far as they go, and they go practically 
to infinity as far as he, the individual unit, is 
concerned. But the average human action, 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 267 

under given conditions, taking a vast multiplic- 
ity of units into account, provides for the un- 
failing evolution of the cycles which constitute 
their collective destiny. 

Individual predestination, it is true, may be 
asserted, not as a religious dogma having to do 
with divine grace or wrath, but on purely met- 
aphysical grounds ; that is to say, it may be 
argued that each human creature is fundamen- 
tally, in infancy, subject to the same influence 
by similar circumstances, and that an adult life 
is thus merely the product or impression of all 
the circumstances which have influenced such a 
life from the beginning, so that if those circum- 
stances were known the moral and intellectual 
result would be known. By this train of reason- 
ing it can be made to appear that the circum- 
stances of each man's life may be theoretically 
knowable by a sufficiently searching intelli- 
gence ; that hereditary tendencies, for example, 
are but products of antecedent circumstances 
entering into any given calculation as a pertur- 
bation, but not the less calculable on that ac- 
count. This contention, however, is no less in 
direct conflict with the consciousness of human- 
ity than the religious dogma of individual pre- 
destination. The sense of free-will is a factor 
in the process which cannot be ignored, and the 
free-will of which we are thus sensible is not a 



268 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

mere automatic impulse, like the twitching of a 
dead frog's leg. The ordinary religious dogma 
and the ordinary metaphysical argument both 
require us to regard it in that light ; but the 
esoteric doctrine restores it to its true dignity, 
and shows us the scope of its activity, the lim- 
its of its sovereignty. It is sovereign over the 
individual career, but impotent in presence of 
the cyclic law, which even so positive a philos- 
opher as Draper detects in human history, — 
brief as the period is which he is enabled to ob- 
serve. And none the less does that collateral 
quicksand of thought which J. S. Mill discerned 
alongside the contradictions of theology — the 
great question whether speculation must work 
with the all-good or all-potent hypothesis — 
find its explanation in the system now dis- 
closed. Those great beings, the perfected efflo- 
rescence of former humanity, who, though far 
from constituting a supreme God, reign never- 
theless in a divine way over the destinies of our 
world, are not only not omnipotent, but, great 
as they are, are restricted as regards their ac- 
tion by comparatively narrow limits. It would 
seem as if, when the stage is, so to speak, pre- 
pared afresh for a new drama of life, they are 
able to introduce some improvements into the 
action, derived from their own experience in 
the drama with which they were concerned. 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 269 

but are only capable, as regards the main con- 
struction of the piece, of repeating that which 
has been represented before. They can do on 
a large scale what a gardener can do with dah- 
lias on a small one ; he can evolve considerable 
improvements in form and color, but his flow- 
ers, however carefully tended, will be dahlias 
still. 

Is it nothing, one may ask in passing, in sup- 
port of the acceptability of the esoteric doctrine, 
that natural analogies support it at every turn ? 
As it is below, so it is above, wrote the early 
occult philosophers ; the microcosm is a mirror 
of the macrocosm. All Nature lying within 
the sphere of our physical observation verifies 
the rule, so far as that limited area can exhibit 
any principles. The structure of lower animals 
is reproduced with modifications in higher ani- 
mals, and in man ; the fine fibres of the leaf 
ramify like the branches of the tree, and the 
microscope follows such ramifications, repeated 
beyond the range of the naked eye. The dust- 
laden currents of rain-water by the roadside 
deposit therein " sedimentary rocks " in the 
puddles they develop, just as the rivers do in 
the lakes and the great waters of the world over 
the sea-bed. The geological work of a pond 
and that of an ocean differ merely in their 
scale, and it is only in scale that the esoteric 



270 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

doctrine shows the sublimest laws of Nature 
differing, in their jurisdiction over the man 
and their jurisdiction over the planetary family. 
As the children of each human generation are 
tended in infancy by their parents, and grow 
up to tend another generation in their turn, so 
in the whole humanity of the great manvantaric 
periods the men of one generation grow to be 
the Dhyan Chohans of the next, and then yield 
their places in the ultimate progress of time to 
their descendants, and pass themselves to higher 
conditions of existence. 

Not less decisively than it answers the ques- 
tion about free-will does the esoteric doctrine 
deal with the existence of evil. This subject 
has been discussed in its place in the preceding 
chapter on the Progress of Humanity, but the 
esoteric doctrine, it will be seen, grapples with 
the great problem more closely than by the 
mere enunciation of the way human free-will, 
which it is the purpose of Nature to grow, and 
cultivate into Dhyan Chohanship, must by the 
hypothesis be free to develop evil itself if it 
likes. So much for the broad principle in oper- 
ation ; but the way it works is traceable in the 
present teaching as clearly as the principle it- 
self. It works through physical Karma, and 
could not but work that way except by a sus- 
pension of the invariable law that causes can. 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 271 

not but produce effects. The objective man 
born into the physical world is just as much 
the creation of the person he last animated as 
the subjective man who has in the interim been 
living the Devachanic existence. The evil that 
men do lives after them, in a more literal sense 
even than Shakespeare intended by those words. 
It may be asked, How can the moral guilt of a 
man in one life cause him to be born blind or 
crippled at a different period of the world's his- 
tory several thousand years later, of parents 
with whom he has had, through his former life, 
no lack of physical connection whatever? But 
the difficulty is met b}^ considering the opera- 
tion of affinities more easily than may be im- 
agined at the first glance. The blind or crip- 
pled child, as regards his physical frame, may 
have been the potentiality rather than the prod- 
uct of local circumstances. But he would not 
have come into existence unless there had been 
a spiritual monad pressing forward for incarna- 
tion, and bearing with it a fifth principle (so 
much of a fifth principle as is persistent, of 
course) precisely adapted by its Karma to in- 
habit that potential body. Given these circum- 
stances, and the imperfectly organized child is 
conceived and brought into the world, to be a 
cause of trouble to himself and others — an 
effect becoming a cause in its turn — and a liv- 



272 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

ing enigma for philosophers endeavoring to ex- 
plain the origin of evil. 

The same explanation applies, with modifica- 
tions, to a vast range of cases that might be 
cited to illustrate the problem of evil in the 
world. Incidentally, moreover, it covers a ques- 
tion connected with the operation of the Karmic 
law that can hardly be called a difficulty, as 
the answer would probably be suggested by the 
bearings of the doctrine itself, but is none the 
less entitled to notice. The selective assimi- 
lation of Karma-laden spirits with parentage 
which corresponds to their necessities or deserts 
is the obvious explanation which reconciles 
rebirth with atavism and heredity. The child 
born may seem to reproduce the moral and 
mental peculiarities of parents or ancestors as 
well as their physical likeness, and the fact 
suggests the notion that his soul is as much an 
offshoot of the family tree as his physical frame. 
It is unnecessary to enlarge here on the multi- 
farious embarrassments by which that theory 
would be surrounded, on the extravagance of 
supposing that a soul thus thrown off, like a 
spark from an anvil, without any spiritual past 
behind it, can have a spiritual future before it. 
The soul, which was thus merely a function of 
the body, would certainly come to an end with 
the dissolution of that out of which it arose 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 273 

The esoteric doctrine, however, as regards trans- 
mitted characteristics, will afford a complete 
explanation of that phenomenon, as well as all 
others connected with human life. The family 
into which he is born is to the re-incarnating 
spirit what a new planet is to the whole tide 
of humanity on a round along the manvantaric 
chain. It has been built up by a process of 
evolution working on a line transverse to that 
of humanity's approach ; but it is fit for human- 
ity to inhabit when the time comes. So with 
the re -incarnating spirit: it presses forward 
into the objective world, the influences which 
have retained it in the Devachanic state having 
been exhausted, and it touches the spring of 
Nature, so to speak, provoking the development 
of a child which without such an impulse would 
merely have been a potentiality, not an actual 
development, but in whose parentage it finds 
— of course unconsciously by the blind opera- 
tion of its affinities — the exact conditions of 
renewed life for which it has prepared itself 
during its last existence. Certainly we must 
never forget the presence of exceptions in all 
broad rules of Nature. In the present case 
it may sometimes happen that mere accident 
causes an injury to a child at birth. Thus a 
crippled frame may come to be bestowed on a 
spirit whose Karma has by no means earned 
18 



274 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

that penalty, and so with a great variety of ac- 
cidents. But of these all that need be said is 
that Nature is not at all embarrassed by her 
accidents ; she has ample time to repair them. 
The undeserved suffering of one life is amply 
redressed under the operation of the Karmic 
law in the next or the next. There is plenty 
of time for making the account even, and the 
adepts declare, I believe, that, as a matter of 
fact, in the long run undeserved suffering oper- 
ates as good luck rather than otherwise, thereby 
deriving from a purely scientific observation 
of facts a doctrine which religion has benevo- 
lently invented sometimes for the consolation of 
the afflicted. 

While the esoteric doctrine affords in this 
way an unexpected solution of the most per- 
plexing phenomena of life, it does this at no 
sacrifice in any direction of the attributes we 
may fairly expect of a true religious science. 
Foremost among the claims we may make on 
such a system is that it shall contemplate 
no injustice, either in the direction of wrong 
done to the deserving, or of benefits bestowed 
on the undeserving ; and the justice of its oper- 
ation must be discernible in great things and 
small alike. The legal maxim, de minimis non 
curat lex, is means of escape for human fallibil. 
ity from the consequences of its own imperfec- 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 275 

tions. -There is no such thing as indifference 
to small things in chemistry or mechanics. 
Nature in physical operations responds with ex- 
actitude to small causes as certainly as to great, 
and we may feel instinctively sure that in her 
spiritual operations also she has no clumsy habit 
of treating trifles as of no consequence, of ig- 
noring small debts in consideration of paying 
big ones, like a trader of doubtful integrity con- 
tent to respect obligations which are serious 
enough to be enforced by law. Now the minor 
acts of life, good and bad alike, are of necessity 
ignored under any system which makes the final 
question at stake, admission to or exclusion 
from a uniform or approximately uniform con- 
dition of blessedness. Even as regards that 
merit and demerit which is solely concerned 
with spiritual consequences, no accurate re- 
sponse could be made by Nature except by 
means of that infinitely graduated condition 
of spiritual existence described by the esoteric 
doctrine as the Devachanic state. But the 
complexity to be dealt with is more serious than 
even the various conditions of Devachanic ex- 
istence can meet. No system of consequences 
ensuing to mankind after the life now under 
observation can be recognized as adapted sci- 
entifically to the emergency, unless it responds 
to the sense of justice, in regard to the multi- 



276 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

farious acts and habits of life generall} T , includ- 
ing those which merely relate to physical ex- 
istence, and are not deeply colored by right or 
wrong. 

Now, it is only by a return to physical exist- 
ence that people can possibly be conceived to 
reap with precise accuracy the harvest of the 
minor causes they may have generated, when 
last in objective life. Thus, on a careful exam- 
ination of the matter, the Karmic law, so unat- 
tractive to Buddhist students, hitherto, in its 
exoteric shape, — and no wonder, — will be seen 
not only to reconcile itself to the sense of justice, 
but to constitute the only imaginable method 
of natural action that would do this. The con- 
tinued individuality running through successive 
Karmic re-births once realized, and the corre- 
sponding chain of personal existences interca- 
lated between each borne in mind, the exquisite 
s} 7 mmetry of the whole system is in no way 
impaired by that feature which seems obnoxious 
to criticism at the first glance, — the successive 
baths of oblivion, through which the re-incar- 
nating spirit has to pass. On the contrary, 
that oblivion itself is in truth the only condition 
Dn which objective life could fairly be started 
afresh. Few earth-lives are entirely free from 
shadows, the recollection of which would darken 
a renewed lease of life for the former personal 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 211 

ity. And if it is alleged that the forgetfulness 
in each life of the last involves waste of experi- 
ence and effort and intellectual acquirements, 
painfully or laboriously obtained, that objection 
can only be raised in forgetfulness of the Deva 
chanic life, in which, far from being wasted, 
such efforts and acquirements are the seeds 
from which the whole magnificent harvest of 
spiritual results will be raised. In the same 
way, the longer the esoteric doctrine occupies 
the mind the more clearly it is seen that every 
objection brought against it meets with a ready 
reply, and only seems an objection from the 
point of view of imperfect knowledge. 

Passing from abstract considerations to oth- 
ers partty interwoven with practical matters, 
we may compare the esoteric doctrine with the 
observable facts of Nature in several ways with 
the view of directly checking its teachings. A 
spiritual science which has successfully divined 
the absolute truth must accurately fit the facts 
of earth whenever it impinges on earth. A 
religious dogma in flagrant opposition to that 
which is manifestly truth in respect of geology 
and astronomy may find churches and congre- 
gations content to nurse it, but is not worth 
serious philosophical consideration. How then 
does the esoteric doctrine square with geology 
and astronomy ? 



278 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

It is not too much to say that it constitutes 
the only religious system that blends itself ea- 
sily with the physical truths discovered by mod- 
ern research in those branches of science. It 
not only blends itself with, in the sense of tol- 
erating, the nebula hypothesis and the stratifi- 
cation of rocks ; it rushes into the arms of these 
facts, so to speak, and could not get on without 
them. It could not get on without the great 
discoveries of modern biology ; as a system rec- 
ommending itself to notice in a scientific age it 
could ill afford to dispense with the latest ac- 
quisitions of physical geography, and it may 
offer a word of thanks even to Professor Tyndall 
for some of his experiments on light, for he 
seems on one occasion, as he describes the phe- 
nomenon without knowing what he is describ- 
ing, in " Fragments of Science," to have pro- 
voked conditions within a glass tube which en- 
abled him for a short time to see the elementals. 

The stratification of the earth's crust is, of 
course, a plain and visible record of the inter- 
racial cataclysms. Physical science is emerging 
from the habits of timidity, which its insolent 
oppression by religious bigotry for fifteen cen- 
turies engendered, but it is still a little shy in 
its relations with dogma, from the mere force 
of habit. In that way, geology has been con« 
tent to say, such and such continents, as then 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 279 

shell-beds testify, must have been more than 
once submerged below and elevated above the 
surface of the ocean. It has not yet grown used 
to the free application of its own materials to 
speculation, which trenches upon religious ter- 
ritory. But surely if geology were required to 
interpret all its facts into a consistent history 
of the earth, throwing in the most plausible 
hypotheses it could invent to rill up gaps in its 
knowledge, it would already construct a history 
for mankind which in its broad outlines would 
not be unlike that sketched out in the chap- 
ter on the Great World Periods ; and the fur- 
ther geological discovery progresses, our esoteric 
teachers assure us, the more closely will the 
correspondence of the doctrine and the bony 
traces of the past be recognized. Already we 
find experts from the Challenger vouching for 
the existence of Atlantis, though the subject be- 
longs to a class of problems unattractive to the 
scientific world generally, so that the considera- 
tions in favor of the lost continent are not yet 
generally appreciated. Already thoughtful ge- 
ologists are quite ready to recognize that in 
regard to the forces which have fashioned the 
earth this, the period within the range of his- 
toric traces, may be a period of comparative 
inertia and slow change ; that cataclysmal met- 
amorphoses may have been added formerly to 



280 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

those of gradual subsidence, upheaval, and de- 
nudation. It is only a step or two to the rec- 
ognition as a fact of what no one could any 
longer find fault with as a hypothesis : that 
great continental upheavals and submergences 
take place alternately ; that the whole map of 
the world is not only thrown occasionally into 
new shapes, like the pictures of a kaleidoscope 
as its colored fragments fall into new arrange- 
ments, but subject to systematically recurrent 
changes, which restore former arrangements at 
enormous intervals of time. 

Pending further discoveries, however, it will, 
perhaps, be admitted that we have a sufficient 
block of geological knowledge already in our 
possession to fortify the cosmogony of the eso- 
teric doctrine. That the doctrine should have 
been withheld from the world generally as long 
as no such knowledge had paved the way for 
its reception can hardly be considered indis- 
creet for the part of its custodians. Whether 
the present generation will attach sufficient im- 
portance to its correspondence with what has 
been ascertained of Nature in other ways re- 
mains to be seen. 

These correspondences may, of course, be 
traced in biology as decisively as in geology. 
The broad Darwinian theory of the Descent of 
Man from the animal kingdom is not the only 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 281 

support afforded by this branch of science to 
the esoteric doctrine. The detailed observa- 
tions now carried out in embryology are espe- 
cially interesting for the light they throw on 
more than one department of this doctrine. 
Thus the now familiar truth that the succes- 
sive stages of ante-natal human development 
correspond to the progress of human evolution 
through different forms of animal life is noth- 
ing less than a revelation, in its analogical bear- 
ings. It does not merely fortify the evolution- 
ary hypothesis itself ; it affords a remarkable 
illustration of the way Nature works in the 
evolution of new races of men at the beginning 
of the great round periods. When a child has 
to be developed from a germ which is so simple 
in its constitution that it is typical less of the 
animal — less even of the vegetable — than of 
the mineral kingdom, the familiar scale of evo- 
lution is run over, so to speak, with a rapid 
touch. The ideas of progress which may have 
taken countless ages to work out in a connected 
chain for the first time are once for all firmly 
lodged in Nature's memory, and thenceforth 
they can be quickly recalled in order, in a few 
months. So with the new evolution of human- 
ity on each planet as the human tide-wave of 
life advances. In the first round the process is 
exceedingly slow, and does not advance far. 



282 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

The ideas of Nature are themselves under' ev- 
olution. But when the process has been ac- 
complished once it can be quickly repeated. 
In the later rounds, the life impulse runs up 
the gamut of evolution with a facility only 
conceivable by help of the illustration which 
embryology affords. This is the explanation 
of the way the character of each round differs 
from its predecessor. The evolutionary work 
which has been once accomplished is soon re- 
peated ; then the round performs its own evo- 
lution at a very different rate, as the child, once 
perfected up to the human type, performs its 
own individual growth but slowly, in proportion 
to the earlier stages of its initial development. 

No elaborate comparison of exoteric Bud- 
dhism with the views of Nature which have now 
been set forth — briefly, indeed, considering 
their scope and importance, but comprehensive- 
ly enough to furnish the reader with a general 
idea of the system in its whole enormous range 
— will be required from me. With the help of 
the information now communicated, more ex- 
perienced students of Buddhist literature will be 
better able to apply to the enigmas that it may 
contain the keys which will unlock their mean- 
ing. The gaps in the public records of Bud- 
dha's teaching will be filled up readily enough 
now, and it will be plain why they were left. 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 283 

For example, in Mr. Rhys Davids' book I find 
this : " Buddhism does not attempt to solve the 
problem of the primary origin of all things ; " 
and quoting from Hardy's "Manual of Bud- 
dhism," he goes on, " When Malunka asked the 
Buddha whether the existence of the world is 
eternal or not eternal, he made him no reply ; 
but the reason of this was that it was considered 
by the teacher as an inquiry that tended to no 
profit." In reality the subject was manifestly 
passed over because it could not be dealt with 
by a plain yes or no, without putting the in- 
quirer upon a false scent ; while to put him on 
the true scent would have required a complete 
exposition of the whole doctrine about the ev- 
olution of the planetary chain, an explanation 
of that for which the community Buddha was 
dealing with was not intellectually ripe. To 
infer from his silence that he regarded the in- 
quiry itself as tending to no profit is a mistake 
which may naturally enough have been made 
in the absence of any collateral knowledge, but 
none can be more complete in reality. No re- 
ligious system that ever publicly employed it- 
self on the problem of the origin of all things 
has, as will now be seen, done more than scratch 
the surface of that speculation, in comparison 
with the exhaustive researches of the esoteric 
science of which Buddha was no less prominent 



284 



ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 



an exponent than he was a prominent teacher 
of morals for the populace. 

The positive conclusions as to what Bud- 
dhism does teach — carefully as he has worked 
them out — are no less inaccurately set forth 
by Mr. Rhys Davids than the negative conclu- 
sion just quoted. It was inevitable that all 
such conclusions should hitherto be inaccurate. 
I quote an example, not to disparage the careful 
study of which it is the fruit, but to show how 
the light now shed over the whole subject pen- 
etrates every cranny and puts an entirely new 
complexion on all its features : — 

" Buddhism takes as its ultimate fact the ex- 
istence of the material world, and of conscious 
beings living within it ; and it holds that every- 
thing is subject to the law of cause and ef- 
fect, and that everything is constantly, though 
imperceptibly, changing. There is no place 
where this law does not operate ; no heaven 
or hell, therefore, in the ordinary sense. There 
are worlds where angels live, whose existence 
is more or less material according as their pre- 
vious lives were more or less holy ; but the 
angels die, and the worlds they inhabit pass 
away. There are places of torment, where the 
evil actions of men or angels produce unhappy 
beings ; but when the active power of the evil 
that produced them is exhausted, they will 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 285 

vanish, and the worlds they inhabit are not 
eternal. The whole Kosmos — earth and heav- 
ens and hells — is always tending to renova- 
tion or destruction, is always in a course of 
change, a series of revolutions or of cycles, of 
which the beginning and the end alike are 
unknowable and unknown. To this universal 
law of composition and dissolution men and 
gods form no exception ; the unity of forces 
which constitutes a sentient being must sooner 
or later be dissolved, and it is only through 
ignorance and delusion that such a being in- 
dulges in the dream that it is a separable and 
self-existent entity." 

Now certainly this passage might be taken to 
show how the popular notions of Buddhist phi- 
losophy are manifestly thrown off from the real 
esoteric philosophy. Most assuredly that phi- 
losophy no more finds in the universe than in 
the belief of any truly enlightened thinker, Asi- 
atic or European, the unchangeable and eter- 
nal heaven and hell of monkish legend ; and 
"the worlds where angels live," and so on, — 
the vividly real though subjective strata of the 
Devachanic state, — are found in Nature truly 
enough. So with all the rest of the popular 
Buddhist conceptions just passed in review. 
But in their popular form they are the nearest 
caricatures of the corresponding items of eso- 



286 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

teric knowledge. Thus the notion about indi- 
viduality being a delusion, and the ultimate 
dissolution as such of the sentient being, is 
perfectly unintelligible without fuller explana- 
tions concerning the multitudinous aeons of in- 
dividual life, in as yet, to us, inconceivable but 
ever-progressive conditions of spiritual exalta- 
tion, which come before that unutterably remote 
mergence into the non-individualized condition. 
That condition certainly must be somewhere in 
futurity, but its nature is something which no 
uninitiated philosopher, at any rate, has ever 
yet comprehended by so much as the faintest 
glimmering guess. As with the idea of Nir- 
vana, so with this about the delusion of indi- 
viduality, writers on Buddhist doctrine derived 
from exoteric sources have most unfortunately 
found themselves entangled with some of the 
remote elements of the great doctrine, under 
the impression that they were dealing with 
Buddhist views of conditions immediately suc- 
ceeding this life. The statement, which is al- 
most absurd, thus put out of its proper place in 
the whole doctrine, may be felt not only as no 
longer an outrage on the understanding, but 
as a sublime truth when restored to its proper 
place in relation to other truths. The ultimate 
mergence of the perfected man-god, or Dhyan 
Chohan, in the absolute consciousness of para 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 287 

nirvana has nothing to do, let me add, with 
the " heresy of individuality," which relates to 
physical personalities. To this subject I recur 
a little later on. 

Justly enough, Mr. Rhys Davids says, in ref- 
erence to the epitome of Buddhist doctrine 
quoted above : " Such teachings are by no 
means peculiar to Buddhism, and similar ideas 
lie at the foundation of earlier Indian philoso- 
phies." (Certainly by reason of the fact that 
Buddhism as concerned with doctrine was ear- 
lier Indian philosophy itself.) " They are to 
be found, indeed, in other systems widely sepa- 
rated from them in time and place ; and Bud- 
dhism, in dealing with the truth which they 
contain, might have given a more decisive and 
more lasting utterance if it had not also bor- 
rowed a belief in the curious doctrine of trans- 
migration, — a doctrine which seems to have 
arisen independently, if not simultaneously, in 
the valley of the Ganges and the valley of the 
Nile. The word transmigration has been used, 
however, in different times and at different 
places for theories similar, indeed, but very dif- 
ferent ; and Buddhism, in adopting the general 
idea from post-Vedic Brahmanism, so modified 
it as to originate, in fact, a new hypothesis. 
The new hypothesis, like the old one, related to 
life in past and future bii'ths, and contributed 



288 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

nothing to the removal here, in this life, of the 
evil it was supposed to explain." 

The present volume should have dissipated 
the misapprehensions on which these remarks 
rest. Buddhism does not believe in anything 
resembling the passage backwards and forwards 
between animal and human forms, which most 
people conceive to be meant by the principle of 
transmigration. The transmigration of Bud- 
dhism is the transmigration of Darwinian evo- 
lution scientifically developed, or rather exhaust- 
ively explored, in both directions. Buddhist 
writings certainly contain allusions to former 
births, in which even the Buddha himself was 
now one and now another kind of animal. But 
these had reference to the remote course of pre- 
human evolution, of which his fully opened 
vision gave him a retrospect. Never in any 
authentic Buddhist writings will any support 
be found for the notion that any human crea- 
ture, once having attained manhood, falls back 
into the animal kingdom. Again, while noth- 
ing, indeed, could be more ineffectual as an ex- 
planation of the origin of evil than such a cari- 
cature of transmigration as would contemplate 
such a return, the progressive re-births of human 
Egos into objective existence, coupled with the 
operation of physical Karma and the inevitable 
play of free-will within the limits of its privi 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 289 

lege, do explain the origin of evil, finally and 
completely. The effort of Nature being to grow 
a new harvest of Dhyan Chohans whenever a 
planetary system is evolved, the incidental de- 
velopment of transitory evil is an unavoidable 
consequence under the operation of the forces 
or processes just mentioned, themselves una- 
voidable stages in the stupendous enterprise 
set on foot. 

At the same time the reader who will now 
take up Mr. Rhys Davids' book and examine 
the long passage on this subject, and on the 
skandhas, will realize how utterly hopeless a 
task it was to attempt the deduction of any ra- 
tional theory of the origin of evil from the exo- 
teric materials there made use of. Nor was it 
possible for these materials to suggest the true 
explanation of the passage immediately after- 
wards, quoted from the Brahmajala Sutra : — 

" After showing how the unfounded belief 
in the eternal existence of God or gods arose, 
Gautama goes on to discuss the question of the 
soul, and points out thirty-two beliefs concern- 
ing it, which he declares to be wrong. These 
are shortly as follows : ' Upon what principle, 
or on what ground, do these mendicants and 
Brahmans hold the doctrine^of future existence? 
They teach that the soul is material, or is im- 
material, or is both or neither ; that it will 
19 



290 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

have one or many modes of consciousness ; that 
its perceptions will be few or boundless ; that 
it will be in a state of joy or of misery, or of 
neither. These are the sixteen heresies, teach- 
ing a conscious existence after death. Then 
there are eight heresies teaching that the soul, 
material or immaterial, or both or neither, finite 
or infinite, or both or neither, has one uncon- 
scious existence after death. And, finally, eight 
others which teach that the soul, in the same 
eight ways, exists after death in a state of be- 
ing neither conscious nor unconscious.' ' Men- 
dicants,' concludes the sermon, 4 that which 
binds the teacher to existence (viz., tanha, 
thirst), is cut off, but his body still remains. 
While his body shall remain, he will be seen 
by gods and men, but after the termination of 
life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither 
gods nor men will see him.' Would it be pos- 
sible in a more complete and categorical man- 
ner to deny that there is any soul, — anything 
of any kind which continues to exist in any 
manner after death ? " 

Certainly, for exoteric students, such a pas- 
sage as this could not but seem in flagrant con- 
tradiction with those teachings of Buddhism 
which deal with the successive passages of the 
same individuality through several incarnations, 
and which thus along another line of thought 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 291 

may see in to assume the existence of a trans- 
missible soul as plainly as the passage quoted 
denies it. Without a comprehension of the 
seven principles of man, no separate utterances 
on the various aspects of this question of im- 
mortality could possibly be reconciled. But 
the key now given leaves the apparent contra- 
diction devoid of all embarrassment. In the 
passage last quoted Buddha is speaking of the 
astral personality, while the immortality recog- 
nized by the esoteric doctrine is that of the 
spiritual individuality. The explanation has 
been fully given in the chapter on Devachan, 
and in the passages quoted there from Colonel 
Olcott's " Buddhist Catechism." It is only 
since fragments of the great revelation this vol- 
ume contains have been given out during the 
last two years in the " Theosophist " that the 
important distinction between personality and 
individuality, as applied to the question of hu- 
man immortality, has settled into an intelligible 
shape, but there are plentiful allusions in former 
occult writing, which may now be appealed to 
in proof of the fact that former writers were 
fully alive to the doctrine itself. Turning to the 
most recent of the occult books, in which the 
veil of obscurity was still left to wrap the doc- 
trine from careless observation, though it was 
strained in many places almost to transparency, 



292 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

we might take any one of a dozen passages to 
illustrate the point before us. Here is one : — 

" The philosophers who explained the fall 
into generation their own way viewed spirit as 
something wholly distinct from the soul. They 
allowed its presence in the astral capsule only 
so far as the spiritual emanations or rays of the 
4 shining one ' were concerned. Man and soul 
had to conquer their immortality by ascending 
toward the unity, with which, if successful, 
they were finally linked, and into which they 
were absorbed, so to say. The individualiza- 
tion of man after death depended on the spirit, 
not on his body and soul. Although the word 
' personality,' in the sense in which it is usually 
understood, is an absurdity if applied literally 
to our immortal essence, still the latter is a dis- 
tinct entity, immortal and eternal per se; and 
as in the case of criminals beyond redemption, 
when the shining thread which links the spirit 
to the soul from the moment of the birth of a 
child is violently snapped, and the disembodied 
entity is left to share the fate of the lower ani- 
mals, to dissolve into ether and have its indi- 
viduality annihilated, — even then the spirit 
remains a distinct being." 2 

No one can read this — scarcely any part, in- 
deed, of the chapter from which it is taken — ■ 

1 Isis Unveiled, vol. i. p. 315. 



TEE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 293 

without perceiving, by the light of the expla- 
nations given in the present volume, that the 
esoteric doctrine now fully given out was per- 
fectly familiar to the writer, though I have been 
privileged to put it for the first time into plain 
and unmistakable language. 

It takes some mental effort to realize the 
difference between personality and individual- 
ity, but the craving for the continuity of per- 
sonal existence, for the full recollection always 
of those transitory circumstances of our present 
physical life which make up the personality, 
is manifestly no more than a passing weakness 
of the flesh. For many people it will perhaps 
remain irrational to say that any person now 
living, with his recollections bounded by the 
years of his childhood, is the same individual as 
some one of quite a different nationality and 
epoch who lived thousands of years ago, or the 
same that will reappear after a similar lapse of 
time under some entirely new conditions in the 
future. But the feeling " I am I" is the same 
through the three lives and through all the 
hundreds; for that feeling is more deeply seated 
than the feeling " I am John Smith, so high, so 
heavy, with such and such property and rela- 
tions," Is it inconceivable, as a notion in the 
mind, that John Smith, inheriting the gift of 
Tithonus, changing his name from time to time, 



294 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

marrying afresh every other generation or so, 
losing property here, coming into possession of 
property there, and getting interested as time 
went on in a great variety of different pursuits, 
— is it inconceivable that such a person in a 
few thousand years should forget all circum- 
stances connected with the present life of John 
Smith, just as if the incidents of that life for 
him had never taken place ? And yet the Ego 
would be the same. If this is conceivable in 
the imagination, what can be inconceivable in 
the individual continuity of an intermittent life, 
interrupted and renewed at regular intervals, 
and varied with passages through a purer con- 
dition of existence. 

No less than it clears up the apparent con- 
flict between the identity of successive individ- 
ualities and the ''heresy " of individuality will 
the esoteric doctrine be seen to put the " in- 
comprehensible mystery of Karma, which Mr. 
Rhys Davids disposes of so summarily, on a 
perfectly intelligible and scientific basis. Of 
this he says that because Buddhism " does not 
acknowledge a soul " it has to resort to the des- 
perate expedient of a mystery to bridge over 
the gulf between one life and another some- 
where else, — the doctrine, namely, of Karma. 
And he condemns the idea as " a non-exist- 
ent fiction of the brain." Irritated as he feels 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 295 

with what he regards as the absurdity of the 
doctrine, he yet applies patience and great men- 
tal ingenuity in the effort to evolve something 
that shall feel like a rational metaphysical con- 
ception out of the tangled utterances concern- 
ing Karma of the Buddhist scriptures. He 
writes : — 

"Karma, from a Buddhist point of view, 
avoids the superstitious extreme, on the one 
hand, of those who believe in the separate ex- 
istence of some, entity called the soul ; and the 
irreligious extreme, on the other, of those who 
do not believe in moral justice and retribu- 
tion. Buddhism claims to have looked through 
the word soul for the fact it purports to cover, 
and to have found no fact at all, but only one 
or other of twenty different delusions which 
blind the eyes of men. Nevertheless, Buddhism 
is convinced that if a man reaps sorrow, dis- 
appointment, pain, he himself, and no other, 
must at some time have sown folly, error, sin; 
and if not in this life, then in some former 
birth. Where, then, in the latter case, is the 
identity between him who sows and him who 
reaps ? In that which alone remains when a 
man dies, and the constituent parts of the sen- 
tient being are dissolved, in the result, namely, 
of his action, speech, and thought, in his good 
or evil Karma (literally his doing), which doe* 



296 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

not die. We are familiar with the doctrine, 
4 Whatever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap,' and can therefore enter into the Bud- 
dhist feeling that whatever a man reaps that he 
must also have sown ; we are familiar with the 
doctrine of the indestructibility of force, and 
can therefore understand the Buddhist dogma 
(however it may contravene our Christian no- 
tions) that no exterior power can destroy the 
fruit of a man's deeds, that they must work out 
their full effect to the pleasant or the bitter end. 
But the peculiarity of Buddhism lies in this : 
that the result of what a man is or does is held 
not to be dissipated, as it were, into many sepa- 
rate streams, but to be concentrated together in 
the formation of one new sentient being, — new, 
that is, in its constituent parts and powers, but 
the same in its essence, its being, its doing, its 
Karma." 

Nothing could be more ingenious as an at- 
tempt to invent for Buddhism an explanation 
of its " mystery " on the assumption that the 
authors of the mystery threw it up originally 
as a " desperate expedient " to cover their re- 
treat from an untenable position. But in re- 
ality the doctrine of Karma has a far simpler 
history and does not need so subtle an interpret 
tation. Like many other phenomena of Nature 
having to do with futurity, it was declared by 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 297 

Buddha an incomprehensible mystery, and ques- 
tions concerning it were thus put aside ; but 
he did not mean that because it was incompre- 
hensible for the populace it was incomprehen- 
sible, or any mystery at all, for the initiates 
in the esoteric doctrine. It was impossible to 
explain it without reference to the esoteric 
doctrine ; but the outlines of that science once 
grasped, Karma, like so much else, becomes a 
comparatively simple matter, — a mystery only 
in the sense in which also the affinity of sul- 
phuric acid for copper and its superior affinity 
for iron are also mysteries. Certainly esoteric 
science for its " lay chelas " at all events, like 
chemical science for its lay chelas, — all stu- 
dents, that is to say, of its mere physical phe- 
nomena, — leaves some mysteries unfathomed in 
the background. I am not prepared to explain 
by what precise molecular changes the higher 
affinities which constitute Karma are stored up 
in the permanent elements of the fifth principle. 
But no more is ordinary science qualified to say 
what it is in a molecule of oxygen which in- 
duces it to desert the molecule of hydrogen 
with which it was in alliance in the raindrop, 
and attach itself to a molecule of the iron of a 
railing on which it falls. But the speck of 
rust is engendered, and a scientific explanation 
of that occurrence is held to have been given 



298 ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 

when its affinities are ascertained and appealed 
to. 

So with Karma, the fifth principle takes up 
the affinities of its good and evil deeds in its 
passage through life, passes with them into 
Devachan, where those which are suitable to 
the atmosphere, so to speak, of that state, fruc- 
tify and blossom in prodigious abundance, and 
then passes on, with such as have not yet ex- 
hausted their energy, into the objective world 
once more. And as certainly as the molecule 
of oxygen brought into the presence of a 
hundred other molecules will fly to that with 
which it has the most affinity, so will the 
Karma-laden spiritual monad fly to that incar- 
nation with which its mysterious attractions 
link it. Nor is there in that process an}^ crea- 
tion of a new sentient being, except in the 
sense that the new bodily structure evolved is 
a new instrument of sensation. That which in- 
habits it, that which feels joy or sorrow, is the 
old Ego, — walled off by forgetf ulness from its 
last set of adventures on earth, it is true, but 
reaping their fruit nevertheless, — the same "I 
am I " as before. 

" Strange it is," Mr. Rhys Davids thinks, 
that " all this " — the explanation of Buddhist 
philosophy which esoteric materials have ena- 
bled him to give — " should have seemed not 



THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 299 

unattractive, these 2,300 years and more, to 
many despairing and earnest hearts ; that they 
should have trusted themselves to the so seem- 
ing stately bridge which Buddhism has tried to 
build over the river of the mysteries and sor- 
rows of life. . . . They have failed to see that 
the very keystone itself, the link between one 
life and another, is a mere word, — this won- 
derful hypothesis, this airy nothing, this im- 
aginary cause beyond the reach of reason, — - 
the individualized and individualizing grace 
of Karma." 

It would have been strange indeed if Bud- 
dhism had been built on such a frail foundation; 
but its apparent frailty has been simply due to 
the fact that its mighty fabric of knowledge 
has hitherto been veiled from view. Now that 
the inner doctrine has been unveiled it will be 
seen how little it depends for any item of its 
belief on shadowy subtleties of metaphysics. 
So far as these have clustered round Buddhism 
they have merely been constructed by external 
interpreters of stray doctrinal hints that could 
not be entirely left out of the simple system of 
morals prescribed for the populace. 

In that which really constitutes Buddhism 
we find a sublime simplicity, like that of Na- 
ture herself, — one law running into infinite 
ramifications ; complexities of detail, it is true, 



300 



ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. 



as Nature herself is infinitely complex in her 
manifestations, however unchangeably uniform 
in her purposes, but always the immutable doc- 
trine of causes and their effects, which in turn 
become causes again in an endless cyclic pro- 
gression. 



APPENDIX. 



NOTE TO CHAPTER I. 

The further we advance in occult study, the more ex- 
alted in many ways become our conceptions of the Ma- 
hatmas. The complete comprehension of the manner in 
which these persons become differentiated from human- 
kind at large, is not to be achieved by the help of mere 
intellectual effort. There are aspects of the adept nature 
which have to do with the extraordinary development of 
the higher principles in man, which cannot be realized by 
the application of the lower. But while crude concep- 
tions in the beginning thus fall very short of reaching the 
real level of the facts, a curious complication of the prob- 
lem arises in this way. Our first idea of an adept who 
has achieved the power of penetrating the tremendous 
secrets of spiritual nature, is modelled on our conception 
of a very highly gifted man of science on our own plane. 
We are apt to think of him as once an adept always an 
adept, — as a very exalted human being, who must neces- 
sarily bring into play in all the relations of his life the 
attributes that attach to him as a Mahatma. In this way, 
while — as above pointed out — we shall certainly fail, do 
all we can, to do justice in our thoughts to his attributes 
as a Mahatma, we may very easily run to the opposite 
extreme in our thinking about him in his ordinary human 



302 APPENDIX. 

aspect, and thus land ourselves in many perplexities, as 
we acquire a partial familiarity with the characteristics of 
the occult world. It is just because the highest attributes 
of adeptship have to do with principles in human nature 
which quite transcend the limits of physical existence, 
that the adept of Mahatma can only be such in the high- 
est acceptation of the word, when he is, as the phrase 
goes, "out of the body," or at all events thrown by spe- 
cial efforts of his will into an abnormal condition. When 
he is not called upon to make such efforts or to pass en- 
tirely beyond the limitations of this fleshly prison, he is 
much more like an ordinary man than experience of 
him in some of his aspects would lead his disciples to 
believe. 

A correct appreciation of this state of things explains 
the apparent contradiction involved in the position of the 
occult pupil towards his masters, as compared with some 
of the declarations that the master himself will frequently 
put forward. For example, the Mahatmas are persistent 
in asserting that they are not infallible, that they are 
men, like the rest of us, perhaps with a somewhat more 
enlarged comprehension of nature than the generality of 
mankind, but still liable to err both in the direction of 
practical business with which they may be concerned, and 
in their estimate of the characters of other men, or the 
capacity of candidates for occult development. But how 
are we to reconcile statements of this nature with the 
fundamental principle at the bottom of all occult research 
which enjoins the neophyte to put his trust in the teaching 
and guidance of his master absolutely and without re- 
serve ? The solution of the difficulty is found in the state 
of things above referred to. While the adept may be a 
man quite surprisingly liable to err sometimes in the ma- 
nipulation of worldly business, just as with ourselves some 



* APPENDIX. 303 

of the greatest men of genius are liable to make mis- 
takes in their daily life that matter-of-fact people could 
never commit, on the other hand, directly a Mahatma 
comes to deal with the higher mysteries of spiritual sci- 
ence, he does so by virtue of the exercise of his Mahatma- 
attributes, and in dealing with these can hardly be recog- 
nized as liable to err. 

This consideration enables us to feel that the trust- 
worthiness of the teachings derived from such a source 
as those which have inspired the present volume, is alto- 
gether above the reach of small incidents which in the 
progress of our experience may seem to claim a revision 
of that enthusiastic confidence in the supreme wisdom of 
the adepts which the first approaches to occult study will 
generally evoke. 

Not that such enthusiasm or reverence will really be 
diminished on the part of any occult chela as his compre- 
hension of the world he is entering expands. The man 
who in one of his aspects is a Mahatma, may rather be 
brought within the limits of affectionate human regard, 
than deprived of his claims to reverence, by the consid- 
eration that in his ordinary life he is not so utterly lifted 
above the commonplace run of human feeling as some 
of his Nirvanic experiences might lead us to believe that 
he would be. 

If we keep constantly in mind that an adept is only 
truly an adept when exercising adept functions, but that 
when exercising these he may soar into spiritual rapport 
with that which is, in regard at all events to the limita- 
tions of our solar system, all that we practically mean 
by omniscience, we shall then be guarded from many of 
the mistakes that the embarrassments of the subject 
might create. 

Intricacies concerning the nature of the adept may be 



304 APPENDIX. 

noticed here, which will hardly be quite intelligible with- 
out reference to some later chapters of this book, but 
which have so important a bearing on all attempts to un- 
derstand what adeptship is really like that it may be con- 
venient to deal with them at once. The dual nature of 
the Mahatma is so complete that some of his influence or 
wisdom on the higher planes of nature may actually be 
drawn upon by those in peculiar psychic relations with 
him, without the Manhatma-man being at the moment 
even conscious that such an appeal has been made to him. 
In this way it becomes open to us to speculate on the 
possibility that the relation between the spiritual Ma- 
hatma and the Mahatma-man may sometimes be rather 
in the nature of what is sometimes spoken of in esoteric 
writing as an overshadowing than as an incarnation in the 
complete sense of the word. 

Furthermore as another independent complication of 
the matter we reach this fact, that each Mahatma is not 
merely a human Ego in a very exalted state, but belongs, 
so to speak, to some specific department in the great econ- 
omy of nature. Every adept must belong to one or other 
of seven great types of adeptship ; but although we may 
almost certainly infer that correspondences might be 
traced between these various types and the seven princi- 
ples of man, I should shrink myself from attempting a 
complete elucidation of this hypothesis. It will be enough 
to apply the idea to what we know vaguely of the occult 
organization in its higher regions. For some time past it 
has been affirmed in esoteric writing that there are five 
great Chohans or superior Mahatmas presiding over the 
whole body of the adept fraternity. When the foregoing 
chapter of this book was written, I was under the impres- 
sion that one supreme chief on a different level again 
.zeroised authority over these five Chohans, but it now 



APPENDIX. 305 

appears to me that this personage may rather be regarded 
as a sixth Chohan, himself the head of the sixth type of 
Mahatmas, and this conjecture leads at once to the fur- 
ther inference that there must be a seventh Chohan to 
complete the correspondences which we thus discern. But 
just as the seventh principle in nature or in man is a con- 
ception of the most intangible order, eluding the grasp of 
any intellectual thinking, and only describable in shadowy 
phrases of metaphysical non-significance, so we may be 
quite sure that the seventh Chohan is very unapproach- 
able by untrained imaginations. But even he no doubt 
plays a part in what may be called the higher economy 
of spiritual nature, and that there is such a personage vis- 
ible occasionally to some of the other Mahatmas I take to 
be the case. But speculation concerning him is valuable 
chiefly as helping to give consistency to the idea above 
thrown out, according to which the Mahatmas may be 
comprehended in their true aspect as necessary phe- 
nomena of nature without whom the evolution of hu- 
manity could hardly be imagined as advancing, not as 
merely exceptional men who have attained great spiritual 
exaltation. 



NOTE TO CHAPTER II. 

Some objection has been raised to the method in which 
the Esoteric Doctrine is presented to the reader in this 
book, on the ground that it is materialistic. I doubt if in 
any other way the ideas to be dealt with could so well be 
brought within the grasp of the mind, but it is easy, when 
they once are grasped, to translate them into terms of 
idealism. The higher principles will be the better suscep- 
20 



306 APPENDIX. 

tible of treatment as so many different states of the Ego,, 
when the attributes of these states have been separately- 
considered as principles undergoing evolution. But it 
may be useful to dwell for a while on the view of the hu- 
man constitution according to which the consciousness of 
the entity migrates successively through the stages of de- 
velopment, which the different principles represent. 

In the highest evolution we need concern ourselves with 
at present — that of the perfected Mahatma — it is some- 
times asserted in occult teaching that the consciousness of 
the Ego has acquired the power of residing altogether in 
the sixth principle. But it would be a gross view of the 
subject, and erroneous, to suppose that the Mahatma has 
on that account shaken off altogether, like a discarded 
sheath or sheaths, the fourth and fifth principles, in which 
his consciousness may have been seated during an ear- 
lier stage of his evolution. The entity which was the 
fourth or fifth principle before, has come now to be dif- 
ferent in its attributes, and to be entirely divorced from 
certain tendencies or dispositions, and is therefore a sixth 
principle. The change can be spoken of in more general 
terms as an emancipation of the adept's nature from the 
enthralments of his lower self, from desires of the ordi- 
nary earth-life — even from the limitations of the affec- 
tions ; for the Ego, which is entirely conscious in his sixth 
principle, has realized the unity of the true Egos of all 
mankind on the higher plane, and can no longer be drawn 
by bonds of sympathy to any one more than to any other. 
He has attained that love of humanity as a whole which 
transcends the love of the Maya or illusion which consti- 
tutes the separate human creature for the limited being 
on the lower levels . of evolution. He has not lost his 
fourth and fifth principles, — these have themselves at- 
tained Mahatmaship ; just as the animal soul of the lowei 



APPENDIX. 307 

kingdom, in reaching humanity, has blossomed into the 
fifth state. That consideration helps us to realize more 
accurately the passage of ordinary human beings through 
the long series of incarnations of the human plane. Once 
fairly on that plane of existence, the consciousness of the 
primitive man gradually envelops the attributes of the 
fifth principle. But the Ego at first remains a centre of 
thought-activity working chiefly with impulses and desires 
of the fourth stage of evolution. Flashes of the higher 
human reason illumine it fitfully at first, but by degrees 
the more intellectual man grows into the fuller possession 
of this. The impulses of human reason assert themselves 
more and more strongly. The invigorated mind becomes 
the predominant force in the life. . Consciousness is trans- 
ferred to the fifth principle, oscillating, however, between 
the tendencies of the lower and higher nature for a long 
while, — that is to say, over vast periods of evolution and 
many hundred lives, — and thus gradually purifying and 
exalting the Ego. All this while the Ego is thus a unity 
in one aspect of the matter, and its sixth principle but a 
potentiality of ultimate development. As regards the 
seventh principle, that is the true Unknowable, the su- 
preme controlling cause of all things, which is the same 
for one man as for every man, the same for humanity as 
for the animal kingdom, the same for the physical as for 
the astral or devachanic or nirvanic planes of existence : 
no one man has got a seventh principle, in the higher 
conception of the subject ; we a^e all in the same un- 
fathomable way overshadowed by the seventh principle of 
the cosmos. 

How does this view of the subject harmonize with the 
statement in the foregoing chapter, that in a certain sense 
the principles are separable, and that the sixth even can 
be imagined as divorcing itself from its next lower neigh- 



308 APPENDIX. 

bor, and, by reincarnation, as growing a new fifth prin- 
ciple by contact with a human organism ? There is no 
incompatibility in the spirit of the two views. The sev- 
enth principle is one and indivisible in all Nature, but 
there is a mysterious persistence through it of certain life- 
impulses, which thus constitute threads on which succes- 
sive existences may be strung. Such a life-impulse does 
not expire even in the extraordinary case supposed, in 
which an Ego, projected upon it and developed along it 
up to a certain point, falls away from it altogether and as 
a complete whole. I am not in a position to dogmatize 
with precision as to what happens in such a case, but the 
subsequent incarnations of the spirit along that line of 
impulse are clearly of the original sequence ; and thus, in 
the materialistic treatment of the idea, it may be said, 
with as much approach to accuracy as language will allow 
in either mode, that the sixth principle of the fallen entity 
in such a case separates itself from the original fifth, and 
reincarnates on its own account. 

But with these abnormal processes it is unnecessary to 
occupy ourselves to any great extent. The normal evo- 
lution is the problem we have first to solve ; and while 
the consideration of the seven principles as such is, to my 
own mind, the most instructive method by which the prob- 
lem can be dealt with, it is well to remember always that 
the Ego is a unity progressing through various spheres or 
states of being, undergoing change and growth and purifi- 
cation all through the course of its evolution, — that it is 
a consciousness seated in this, or that, or the other, of the 
potential attributes of a human entity. 



APPENDIX. 309 



NOTE TO CHAPTER III. 

An expression occurs in this chapter which does not 
recommend itself to the somewhat fuller conceptions I 
have been able to form of the subject since this book was 
written. It is stated that " the spiritual monads — the 
individual atoms of that immense life-impulse of which 
so much has been said — do not fully complete their min- 
eral existence on globe A, then complete it on globe B, 
and so on. They pass several times round the whole cir- 
cle as minerals, and then again several times round as 
vegetables, &c." Now it is intelligible to me that I was 
permitted to use this form of expression in the first in- 
stance because the main purpose in view was to elucidate 
the way in which the human entity was gradually evolved 
from processes of Nature going on in the first instance 
in lower kingdoms. But in truth at a later stage of the 
inquiry it becomes manifest that the vast process of which 
the evolution of humanity and all which that leads up to 
is the crowning act, the descent of spirit into matter, does 
not bring about a differentiation of individualities until a 
much later stage than is contemplated in the passage just 
quoted. In the mineral worlds on which the higher forms 
of plant and animal life have not yet been established, 
there is no such thing, as yet, as an individual spiritual 
monad, unless indeed by virtue of some inconceivable 
unity — inconceivable, but subject to treatment as a the- 
ory none the less — in the life-impulses which are destined 
to give rise to the later chains of highly organized exist- 
ence. Just as in a preceding note we assumed the unity 
of such a life-impulse in the case of a perverted human 
Ego falling away as a whole from the current of evolu- 
tion on which it was launched, so we may assume the same 



310 APPENDIX. 

unity backwards to the earliest beginnings of the plane- 
tary chain. But this can be no more than a protective 
hypothesis, reserving us the right to investigate some mys- 
teries later on that we need not go into at present. For 
a general appreciation of the subject it is better to regard 
the first infusion, as it were, of spirit into matter as pro- 
voking a homogeneous manifestation. The specific forms 
of the mineral kingdom, the crystals and differentiated 
rocks, are but bubbles in the seething mass assuming par- 
tially individualized forms for a time, and rushing again 
into the general substance of the growing cosmos, not yet 
true individualities. Nor even in the vegetable kingdom 
does individuality set in. The vegetable establishes or- 
ganic matter in physical manifestation, and prepares the 
way for the higher evolution of the animal kingdom. In 
this, for the first time, but only in the higher regions of 
this, is true individuality evoked. Therefore it is not till 
we begin in imagination to contemplate the passage of the 
great life-impulse round the planetary chain on the level 
of animal incarnation, that it would be strictly justifiable 
to speak of the spiritual monads as travelling round the 
circle as a plurality, to which the word " they " would 
properly apply. 

It is evidently not with the intention of encouraging 
any close study of evolution on the very grand scale with 
which we are dealing here, that the adept authors of the 
doctrine set forth in this volume have opened the subject 
of the planetary chain. As far as humanity is concerned, 
the period during which this earth will be occupied by our 
race is more than long enough to absorb all our specula- 
tive energy. The magnitude of the evolutionary process 
to be accomplished during that period is more than enough 
to tax to the utmost the capacities of an ordinary imagi- 
nation. But it is extremely advantageous for students of 



APPENDIX. 311 

the occult doctrine to realize the plurality of worlds in 
our system once for all — their intimate relations with, 
their interdependence on each other — before concentrat- 
ing attention on the evolution of this single planet. For 
in many respects the evolution of a single planet follows 
a routine, as it will be found directly, that bears an ana- 
logical resemblance to the routine affecting the entire se- 
ries of planets to which it belongs. The older writings 
on occult science, of the obscurely worded order, some- 
times refer to successive states of one world, as if suc- 
cessive worlds were meant, and vice versa. Confusion 
thus arises in the reader's mind, and according to the bent 
of his own inclination he clings to various interpretations 
of the misty language. The obscurity disappears when 
we realize that in the actual facts of Nature we have to 
recognize both courses of change. Each planet, while in- 
habited by humanity, goes through metamorphoses of a 
highly important and impressive character, the effect of 
which may in each case be almost regarded as equivalent 
to the reconstitution of the world. But none the less, if 
the whole group of such changes is treated as a unity, 
does it form one of a higher series of changes. The sev- 
eral worlds of the chain are objective realities, and not 
symbols of change in one single, variable world. Further 
remarks on this head will fall into their place more nat- 
urally at the close of a later chapter. 



NOTE TO CHAPTERS V., VI. 

There is no part of the present volume which I now 
regard as in so much urgent need of amplification as chap- 



812 APPENDIX. 

ters V. and VI. The Kama loca stage of existence, and 
that higher region or state of Devachan, to which it is but 
the antechamber, were, designedly I take it, left by our 
teachers in the first instance in partial obscurity, in order 
that the whole scheme of evolution might be the better 
understood. The spiritual state which immediately fol- 
lows our present physical life is a department of Nature, 
the study of which is almost unhealthily attractive for 
every one who once realizes that some contact with it — 
some processes of experiment with its conditions — are pos- 
sible even during this life. Already we can to a certain ex- 
tent discern the phenomena of that state of existence into 
which a human creature passes at the death of the body. 
The experience of spiritualism has supplied us with facts 
concerning it in very great abundance. These facts are 
but too highly suggestive of theories and inferences which 
seem to reach the ultimate limits of speculation, and noth- 
ing but the bracing mental discipline of esoteric study in 
its broadest aspect will protect any mind addressed to the 
consideration of these facts from conclusions which that 
study shows to be necessarily erroneous. For this reason, 
theosophical inquirers have nothing to regret as far as 
their own progress in spiritual science is at stake, in the 
circumstances which have hitherto induced them to be 
rather neglectful of the problems that have to do with 
the state of existence next following our own. It is im- 
possible to exaggerate the intellectual advantages to be 
derived from studying the broad design of Nature through- 
out those vast realms of the future which only the perfect 
clairvoyance of the adepts can penetrate, before going 
into details regarding that spiritual foreground, which is 
partially accessible to less powerful vision, but liable, on 
a first acquaintance, to be mistaken for the whole expanse 
of the future. 



APPENDIX. 313 

The earlier processes, however, through which the soul 
passes at death, may be described at this date somewhat 
more fully than they are denned in the foregoing chapter. 
The nature of the struggle that takes place in Kama loca 
between the upper and lower duads may now, I believe, 
be apprehended more clearly than at first. That struggle 
appears to be a very protracted and variegated process, 
and to constitute, — not, as some of us may have conjec- 
tured at first, an automatic or unconscious assertion of 
affinities or forces quite ready to determine the future of 
the spiritual monad at the period of death, — but a phase 
of existence which may be, and in the vast majority of 
cases is more than likely to be, continued over a consider- 
able series of years. And during this phase of existence 
it is quite possible for departed human entities to mani- 
fest themselves to still living persons through the agency 
of spiritual mediumship, in a way which may go far to- 
wards accounting for, if it does not altogether vindicate, 
the impressions that spiritualists derive from such com- 
munications. 

But we must not conclude too hastily that the human 
soul going through the struggle or evolution of Kama loca 
is in all respects what the first glance at the position, as 
thus defined, may seem to suggest. First of all, we must 
beware of too grossly materializing our conception of the 
struggle, by thinking of it as a mechanical separation of 
principles. There is a mechanical separation involved in 
the discard of lower principles when the consciousness of 
the Ego is firmly seated in the higher. Thus at death 
the body is mechanically discarded by the soul, which in 
union, perhaps (with intermediate principles), may act- 
ually be seen by some clairvoyants of a high order to 
quit the tenement it no longer needs. And a very sim- 
ilar process may ultimately take place in Kama loca it- 



314 APPENDIX. 

self, in regard to the matter of the astral principles. But 
postponing this consideration for a few moments, it is im- 
portant to avoid supposing that the struggle of Kama loca 
does itself constitute this ultimate division of principles, 
or second death upon the astral plane. 

The struggle of Kama loca is in fact the life of the en- 
tity in that phase of existence. As quite correctly stated 
in the text of the foregoing chapter, the evolution taking 
place during that phase of existence is not concerned with 
the responsible choice between good and evil which goes 
on during physical life. Kama loca is a portion of the 
great world of effects, — not a sphere in which causes are 
generated (except under peculiar circumstances). The 
Kama loca entity, therefore, is not truly master of his 
own acts ; he is rather the sport of his own already estab- 
lished affinities. But these are all the while asserting 
themselves, or exhausting themselves, by degrees, and the 
Kama loca entity has an existence of vivid consciousness 
of one sort or another the whole time. Now a moment's 
reflection will show that those affinities, which are gath- 
ering strength. and asserting themselves, have to do with 
the spiritual aspirations of the life last experienced, while 
those which are exhausting themselves have to do with 
its material tastes, emotions, and proclivities. The Kama 
loca entity, be it remembered, is on his way to Devachan, 
or, in other words, is growing into that state which is the 
Devachanic state, and the process of growth is accom- 
plished by action and reaction, by ebb and flow, like al- 
most every other in Nature, — by a species of oscillation 
between the conflicting attractions of matter and spirit. 
Thus the Ego advances towards Heaven, so to speak, or 
recedes towards earth, during his Kama loca existence, 
and it is just this tendency to oscillate between the two 
poles of thought or condition that brings him back occa- 
sionally within the sphere of the life he has just quitted. 



APPENDIX. gig 

thiet tf £\w a , n J meaDS "* ° n ° e that his «*»* »jmpa- 
tine. with that Me are dissipated. His sympathies^ 
the higher aspects of that life, be it remembered, are not 
even on their way to dissipation. For instance, in what i 

exerc.se of affection, which is a function of Devachanic 
essence in a preeminent degree. Bnt perhaps even" 
regard to h affecti(ms there be ^ J ™ m 

aspects of these, and the contemplation of [hem, w h he 
_ tances and surroundings of the earth-life, may 
of en have to do wtth the recession towards earth-life of 
the Kama loca entity referred to above 

Of conrseit will be apparent at once that the inter- 

ZrZTl PraCtiCe ° f SpiritUaKsm SetS «P ^twcen 
snch Kama-loca entities as are here in view, and the 

periods of the soul's existence in which earth memories 
engage its attention ; and there are two consider" 
of ^ry important natnre which arise out JZZ 

1st. While its attention is thus directed, it is turned 
away from the spiritual progress on which t is enZli 
during its oscillations in the other direction. It Ly f afr 1 
well remember, and in conversation refer to th I , . 
aspirations of the life m earth , ^^ J?. « 

iZTC'T t0 be ° f " ° rfer te eannot b a! 
latcdbact into terms of the ordinarv phvsical iutellec 

wtii: 1 th- T' io be not •**» fc « 

faculties which are in operation in the soul during its oe 
upatiou Wlth old . earth memor;es The ZJ oc 

w & f ed> but ° niy to a ^ im ^« -*-t 

by the case of a poor emigrant, whom we may imagine 
prospering in his new country, getting educated there 
concerning himself with its publics and fa^ 



316 APPENDIX. 

philanthropy, and so on. He may keep up an interchange 
of letters with his relations at home, but he will find it 
difficult to keep them au courant with all that has come to 
be occupying his thoughts. The illustration will only fully 
apply to our present purpose, however, if we think of the 
emigrant as subject to a psychological law which draws a 
veil over his understanding when he sits down to write to 
his former friends, and restores him during that time to 
his former mental condition. He would then be less and 
less able to write about the old topics as time went on, for 
they would not only be below the level of those to the con- 
sideration of which his real mental activities had risen, 
but would to a great extent have faded from his memory. 
His letters would be a source of surprise to their recip- 
ients, who would say to themselves that it was certainly 
so-and-so who was writing, but that he had grown very 
dull and stupid compared to what he used to be before he 
went abroad. 

2dly. It must be borne in mind that a very well-known 
law of physiology, according to which faculties are invig- 
orated by use and atrophied by neglect, applies on the as- 
tral as well as on the physical plane. The soul in Kama- 
loca, which acquires the habit of fixing its attention on 
the memories of the life it has quitted, will strengthen 
and harden those tendencies which are at war with its 
higher impulses. The more frequently it is appealed to 
by the affection of friends still in the body to avail itself 
of the opportunities furnished by mediumship for mani- 
festing its existence on the physical plane, the more vehe- 
ment will be the impulses which draw it back to physical 
life, and the more serious the retardation of its spiritual 
progress. This consideration appears to involve the most 
influential motive which leads the representatives of The- 
osophical teaching to discountenance and disapprove of 



APPENDIX. 317 

all attempts to hold communication with departed souls 
by means of the spiritual seance. The more such com- 
munications are genuine the more detrimental they are to 
the inhabitants of Kama loca concerned with them. In 
the present state of our knowledge it is difficult to deter- 
mine with confidence the extent to which the Kama loca 
entities are thus injured. And we may be tempted to be- 
lieve that in some cases the great satisfaction derived by 
the living persons who communicate, may outweigh the 
injury so inflicted on the departed soul. This satisfac- 
tion, however, will only be keen in proportion to the fail- 
ure of the still living friend to realize the circumstances 
under which the communication takes place. At first, it 
is true, very shortly after death, the still vivid and com- 
plete memories of earth-life may enable the Kama loca 
entity to manifest himself as a personage very fairly like 
his deceased self, but from the moment of death the 
change in the direction of his evolution sets in. He will, 
as manifesting on the physical plane, betray no fresh fer- 
mentation of thought in his mind. He will never, in that 
manifestation, be any wiser, or higher in the scale of Na- 
ture, than he was when he died ; on the contrary, he must 
become less and less intelligent, and apparently less in- 
structed than formerly, as time goes on. He will never 
do himself justice in communication with the friends left 
behind, and his failure in this respect will grow more and 
more painful by degrees. 

Yet another consideration operates to throw a very 
doubtful light on the wisdom or propriety of gratifying a 
desire for intercourse with deceased friends. We may 
say, never mind the gradually fading interest of the friend 
who has gone before, in the earth left behind ; while there 
is anything of his or her old self left to manifest itself to 
us, it will be a delight to communicate even with that* 



318 APPENDIX. 

And we may argue that if the beloved person is delayed 
a little on his way to Heaven by talking with us, he or she 
would be willing to make that sacrifice for our sake. The 
point overlooked here is, that on the astral, just as on the 
physical plane, it is a very easy thing to set up a bad 
habit. The soul in Kama loca once slaking a thirst for 
earthly intercourse at the wells of mediumship will have 
a strong impulse to fall back again and again on that in- 
dulgence. We may be doing a great deal more than di- 
verting the soul's attention from its own proper business 
by holding spiritualistic relations with it. We may be 
doing it serious and almost permanent injury. I am not 
affirming that this would invariably or generally be the 
case, but a severe view of the ethics of the subject must 
recognize the dangerous possibilities involved in the course 
of action under review. On the other hand, however, it 
is plain that cases may arise in which the desire for com- 
munication chiefly asserts itself from the other side : that 
is to say, in which the departed soul is laden with some 
unsatisfied desire — pointing possibly towards the fulfil- 
ment of some neglected duty on earth — the attention to 
which, on the part of still living friends, may have an ef- 
fect quite the reverse of that attending the mere encour- 
agement of the Kama loca entity in the resumption of its 
old earthly interests. In such cases the living friends 
may, by falling in with its desire to communicate, be the 
means, indirectly, of smoothing the path of the spiritual 
progress. Here again, however, we must be on our guard 
against the delusive aspect of appearances. A wish man- 
ifested by an inhabitant of Kama loca may not always be 
the expression of an idea then operative in his mind. It 
may be the echo of an old, perhaps of a very old, desire, 
then for the first time finding a channel for its outward 
expression. In this way, although it would be reasonable 



APPENDIX. 319 

to treat as important an intelligible wish conveyed to us 
from Kama loca by a person only lately deceased, it would 
be prudent to regard with great suspicion such a wish ema- 
nating from the shade of a person who had been dead a 
long time, and whose general demeanor as a shade did not 
seem to convey the notion that he retained any vivid con- 
sciousness of his old personality. 

The recognition of all these facts and possibilities of 
Kama loca will, I think, afford theosophists a satisfactory 
explanation of a good many experiences connected with 
spiritualism which the first exposition of the Esoteric Doc- 
trine, as bearing on this matter, left in much obscurity. 

It will be readily perceived that as the soul slowly 
clears itself in Kama loca of the affinities which retard 
its Devachanic development, the aspect it turns towards 
the earth is more and more enfeebled, and it is inevitable 
that there must always be in Kama loca an enormous 
number of entities nearly ripe for a complete mergence in 
Devachan, who ou that very account appear to an earthly 
observer in a state of advanced decrepitude. These will 
have sunk, as regards the activity of their lower astral 
principles, into the condition of the altogether vague and 
unintelligible entities, which, following the example of 
older occult writers, I have referred to as " shells " in the 
text of this chapter. The designation, however, is not 
altogether a happy one. It might have been better to 
have followed another precedent, and to have called them 
"shades," but either way their condition would be the 
same. All the vivid consciousness inhering, as they left 
the earth, in the principles appropriately related to the 
activities of physical life, has been transferred to the 
higher principles which do not manifest at stances. Their 
memory of earth-life has almost become extinct. Their 
lower principles are in such cases only reawakened by the 



320 APPENDIX. 

influences of the mediumistic current into which they may 
be drawn, and they become then little more than astral 
looking-glasses, in which the thoughts of the medium or 
sitters at the stance are reflected. If we can imagine the 
colors on a painted canvas sinking by degrees into the 
substance of the material, and at last re emerging in their 
pristine brilliancy on the other side, we shall be conceiv- 
ing a process which might not have destroyed the picture, 
but which would leave a gallery in which it took place a 
dreary scene of brown and meaningless backs, and that is 
very much what the Kama loca entities become before 
they ultimately shed the very material on which their first 
astral consciousness operated, and pass into the wholly 
purified Devachanic condition. 

But this is not the whole of the story which teaches us 
to regard manifestations coming from Kama loca with dis- 
trust. Our present comprehension of the subject enables 
us to realize that when the time arrives for that second 
death on the astral plane, which releases the purified Ego 
from Kama loca altogether and sends it onward to the 
Devachanic state — something is left behind in Kama 
loca which corresponds to the dead body bequeathed to 
the earth when the soul takes its first flight from physical 
existence. A dead astral body is in fact left behind in 
Kama loca, and there is certainly no impropriety in ap- 
plying the epithet " shell " to that residuum. The true 
shell in that state disintegrates in Kama loca before very 
long, just as the true body left to the legitimate processes 
of Nature on earth would soon decay and blend its ele- 
ments with the general reservoirs of matter of the order 
to which they belong. But until that disintegration is ac- 
complished, the shell which the real Ego has altogether 
abandoned may even in that state be mistaken sometimes 
at spiritual seances for a living entity. It remains for a 



APPENDIX. 321 

time an astral looking-glass, in which mediums may see 
their own thoughts reflected, and take these back, fully 
believing them to come from an external source These 
phenomena in the truest sense of the term are galvanized 
• astral corpses ; none the less so, because until they are 
actually disintegrated a certain subtle connection will sub- 
sist between them and the true Devachanic spirit ; just 
as such a subtle communication subsists in the first in- 
stance between the Kama loca entity and the dead body 
left on earth. That last - mentioned communication is 
kept up by the finally-diffused material of the original 
third principle, or linga sharira, and a study of this branch 
of the subject will, I believe, lead us up to a better com- 
prehension than we possess at present of the circum- 
stances under which materializations are sometimes ac- 
complished at spiritual seances. But without going into 
that digression now, it is enough to recognize that the 
analogy may help to show how, between the Devachanic 
entity and the discarded shell in Kama loca a similar con- 
nection may continue for a while, acting, while it lasts, as 
a drag on the higher spirit, but perhaps as an after-glow 
of sunset on the shell. It would surely be distressing, 
however, m the highest degree, to any living friend of rhe 
person concerned, to get, through clairvoyance, or in any 
other way, sight or cognition of such a shell, and to be led 
mto mistaking it for the true entity. 

The comparatively clear view of Kama loca which we 
are now enabled to take, may help us to employ terms re- 
a mg to its phenomena with more precision than we have 
hitherto been able to attain. I think if we adopt one new 
expression, "astral soul," as applying to the entities in 
Kama loca who have recently quitted earth-life, or who 
for other reasons still retain, in the aspect they turn back 
towards earth, a large share of the intellectual attributes 



322 APPENDIX. 

that distinguished them on earth, we shall then find the 
other terms in use already, adequate to meet our remain- 
ing emergencies. Indeed, we may then get rid entirely 
of the inconvenient term " elementary," liable to be con- 
fused with elemental, and singularly inappropriate to the 
beings it describes. I would suggest that the astral soul 
as it sinks (regarded from our point of view) into intel- 
lectual decrepitude, should be spoken of in its faded con- 
dition as a shade, and that the term shell should be re- 
served for the true shells or astral dead bodies which the 
Devachanic spirit has finally quitted. 

We are naturally led in studying the law of spiritual 
growth in Kama loca to inquire how long a time may 
probably elapse before the transfer of consciousness from 
the lower to the higher principles of the astral soul may 
be regarded as complete ; and as usual, when we come to 
figures relating to the higher processes of Nature, the an- 
swer is very elastic. But I believe the esoteric teachers 
of the East declare that as regards the average run of 
humanity — for what may be called, in a spiritual sense, 
the great middle classes of humanity — it is unusual that 
a Kama loca entity will be in a position to manifest as such 
for more than twenty-five to thirty years. But on each 
side of this average the figures may run up very consid- 
erably. That is to say, a very ignoble and besotted hu- 
man creature may hang about in Kama loca for a much 
longer time for want of any higher principles sufficiently 
developed to take up his consciousness at all, and at the 
other end of the scale the very intellectual and mentally- 
active soul may remain for very long periods in Kama loca 
(in the absence of spiritual affinities in corresponding 
force), by reason of the great persistence of forces and 
causes generated on the higher plane of effects, though 
mental activity could hardly be divorced in this way from 



APPENDIX. 323 

spirituality except in cases where it was exclusively asso- 
ciated with worldly ambition. Again, while Kama loca 
periods may thus be prolonged beyond the average from 
various causes, they may sink to almost infinitesimal brev- 
ity when the spirituality of a person dying at a ripe old 
age, and at the close of a life which has legitimately ful- 
filled its purpose, is already far advanced. 

There is one other important possibility connected with 
manifestations reaching us by the usual channels of com- 
munication with Kama loca, which it is desirable to notice 
here, although from its nature the realization of such a 
possibility cannot be frequent. No recent students of 
theosophy can expect to know as yet very much about the 
conditions of existence which await adepts who relinquish 
the use of physical bodies on earth. The higher possi- 
bilities open to them appear to me quite beyond the 
reach of intellectual appreciation. No man is clever 
enough, by virtue of the mere cleverness seated in a liv- 
ing brain, to understand Nirvana ; but it would appear 
that adepts in some cases elect to pursue a course lying 
midway between re-incarnation and the passage into Nir- 
vana, and in the higher regions of Devachan ; that is to 
say, in the arupa state of Devachan may await the slow 
advance of human evolution towards the exalted condi- 
tion they have thus attained. Now an adept who had 
thus become a Devachanic spirit of the most elevated type 
would not be cut off by the conditions of his Devachanic 
state — as would be the case with a natural Devachanic 
spirit passing through that state on his way to re-incarna- 
tion — from manifesting his influence on earth. His 
would certainly not be an influence which would make 
itself felt by the instrumentality of any physical signs to 
mixed audiences, but it is not impossible that a medium 
of the highest type — who would more properly be called 



324 



APPENDIX. 



a seer — might be thus influenced. By such an Adept 
spirit, some great men in the world's history may from 
time to time have been overshadowed and inspired, con- 
sciously or unconsciously as the case may have been: 

The disintegration of shells in Kama loca will inevi- 
tably suggest to any one who endeavors to comprehend 
the process at all, that there must be in Nature some 
general reservoirs of the matter appropriate to that sphere 
of existence, corresponding to the physical earth and its 
surrounding elements, into which our own bodies are 
resigned at death. The grand mysteries on which this 
consideration impinges will claim a far more exhaustive 
investigation than we have yet been enabled to under- 
take ; but one broad idea connected with them may use- 
fully be put forward without further delay. The state 
of Kama loca is one which has its corresponding orders 
of matter in manifestation round it. I will not here at- 
tempt to go into the metaphysics of the problem, which 
might even lead us to discard the notion that astral mat- 
ter need be any less real and tangible than that which 
appeals to our physical senses. It is enough for the 
present to explain that the propinquity of Kama loca to 
the earth, which is so readily made apparent by spirit- 
ualistic experience, is explained by Oriental teaching to 
arise from this fact, — that Kama loca is just as much 
in and of the earth as, during our lives, our astral soul is 
in and of the living man. The stage of Kama loca, in 
fact, the great realm of matter in the appropriate state 
which constitutes Kama loca and is perceptible to the 
senses of astral entities, as also to those of many clair- 
voyants, is the fourth principle of the earth, just as the 
Kama-rupa is the fourth principle of man. For the earth 
has its seven principles like the human creatures who in- 
habit it. Thus, the Devachanic state corresponds to the 



APPENDIX. 325 

fifth principle of the earth, and Nirvana to the sixth 
principle. 



NOTE TO CHAPTER VII. 

Later information and study — the comparison, that is 
to say, of the various branches of the doctrine, and the col, 
location of other statements with those in Chapter VII — 
show the difficulty of applying figures to the Esoteric Doc- 
trines m a very striking light. Figures may be quite trust- 
worthy as representing broad averages, and yet very 
misleading when applied to special cases. Devachanic 
periods vary for different people within such very wide 
limits that any rule laid down in the matter must be sub- 
ject to a bewildering cloud of exceptions. To begin with 
the average mentioned above has no doubt been computed 
with reference to fully matured adults. Between the quite 
young child who has no Devachanic period at all and the 
adult who accomplishes an average period we have to take 
note of persons dying in youth, who have accumulated 
Karma, and who must therefore pass through the usual 
stages of spiritual development, but for whom the brief 
lives they have spent have not produced causes which take 
very long to work themselves out. Such persons would 
return to incarnation after a sojourn in the world of effects 
of corresponding brevity. Again there are such things as 
artificial incarnations accomplished by the direct interven- 
tion of the Mahatmas when a chela who may not yet have 
acquired anything resembling the power of controlling the 
-matter himself, is brought back into incarnation almost 
immediately after his previous physical death, without 
having been suffered to float into the current of natural 



326 



APPENDIX. 



causes at all. Of course in such cases it may be said that 
the claims the person concerned has established on the 
Mahatmas are themselves natural causes of a kind, the 
intervention of the Mahatmas, who are quite beyond the 
liability of acting capriciously in such a matter, being so 
much fruit of effort in the preceding life, so much Karma. 
But still either way such cases would be equally with- 
drawn from the operation of the general average rule. 

Clearly it is impossible when the complicated facts of an 
entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained 
mind for the first time, to put them forward with all 
their appropriate qualifications, compensations and abnor- 
mal developments visible from the beginning. We must 
be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the 
exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with 
occult study, in connection with which the traditional 
methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impress- 
ing every fresh idea on the memory, by provoking the 
perplexity it at last relieves. In relation to another mat- 
ter dealt with in the preceding pages, an important ex- 
ception in Nature has thus, it seems to me now, been left 
out of account. The description I have given of the prog- 
ress of the human tide-wave is quite coherent as it stands, 
but since the publication of the original edition of this 
book some criticism was directed, in India, to a compari- 
son between my version of the story and certain passages 
in other writings, known to emanate from a Mahatma. 
A discrepancy between the two statements was pointed out, 
the other version assuming the possibility that a monad 
actually might have travelled round the seven planets once 
more often than the compeers among whom he might 
ultimately find himself on this earth. My account of the 
obscurations appears to render this contingency impossi- 
ble. The clue to the mystery appears to lie outside the 



APPENDIX. 327 

domain of those facts concerning which the adepts are 
willing to speak freely; and the reader must clearly un- 
derstand that the explanation I am about to offer is the 
fruit of my own speculation and comparison of different 
parts of the doctrine — not authentic information received 
from the author of my general teaching. 

The fact appears to be that the obscurations are so far 
complete as to present all the phenomena above described 
in regard to each planet they affect as a whole. But ex- 
ceptional phenomena, for which we must be ever on the 
alert, come into play even in this matter. The great 
bulk of humanity is driven on from one planet to the next 
by the great cyclic impulse when its time comes for such a 
transition, but the planet it quits is not utterly denuded of 
humanity, nor is it, in every region of its surface rendered, 
by the physical and climatic changes that come on, unfit 
to be the habitation of human beings. Even during ob- 
scuration a small colony of humanity clings to each planet, 
and the monads associated with these small colonies fol- 
lowing different laws of evolution, and beyond the reach 
of those attractions which govern the main vortex of hu- 
manity in the planet occupied by the great tide-wave, 
pass on from world to world along what may be called 
the inner round of evolution, far ahead of the race at 
large. What may be the circumstances which occasion- 
ally project a soul even from the midst of the great human 
vortex, right out of the attraction of the planet occupied 
by the tide-wave, and into the attraction of the Inner 
Round — is a question that can only be a subject for us 
at present of very uncertain conjecture. 

It may be worth while to draw attention, in connection 
with the solution I have ventured to offer as applicable 
to the problem of the Inner Rounds, to the way in which 
the fact of Nature I assume to exist, would harmonize 



328 



APPENDIX. 



with the widely diffused doctrines of the Deluge. That 
portion of a planet which remained habitable during an 
obscuration would be equivalent to the Noah's Ark of the 
biblical narrative taken in its largest symbolical meaning. 
Of course the narrative of the Deluge has minor sym- 
bolical meanings also, but it does not appear improbable 
that the Kabalists should also have associated with it the 
larger significance now suggested. In due time when the 
obscured planet grew ready once more to receive a full 
population of humanity, the colonists of the ark would 
be ready to commence the process of populating it afresh. 



NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII. 



The condition into which the monads failing to pass the 
middle of the fifth round must fall as the tide of evo- 
lution sweeps on, leaving them stranded, so to speak, 
upon the shores of time, is not described very fully in this 
chapter. By a few words only is it indicated that the 
failures of each manwantara are not absolutely annihilated 
when they reach " the end of their tether," but are destined 
after some enormous period of waiting to pass once more 
into the current of evolution. Many inferences may be 
deduced from this condition of things. The period of 
waiting which the failures have thus to undergo, is, to 
begin with, a duration so stupendous as to baffle the im- 
agination. The latter half of the fifth round, the whole of 
the sixth and seventh have to be performed by the suc- 
cessful graduates in spirituality, and the latter rounds 
are of immensely longer duration than those of the middle 
period. Then follows the vast interval of Nirvanic rest, 
which closes the manwantara, the immeasurable Night 



APPENDIX. 329 

of Brahma, the Pralaya of the whole planetary chain. 
Only when the next manwantara begins do the failures 
begin to wake from their awful trance — awful to the 
imagination of beings in the full activity of life, though 
such a trance, being necessarily all but destitute of con- 
sciousness, is possibly no more tedious than a dreamless 
night in the memory of a profound sleeper. The fate 
of the failures may be grievous first of all, rather on 
account of what they miss, than on account of what they 
incur. Secondly, however, it is grievous on account of 
that to which it leads, for all the trouble of physical life 
and almost endless incarnations must be gone through 
afresh, when the failures wake up; whereas the perfected 
beings, who outstripped them in evolution during that 
fifth round in which they became failures, will have 
grown into the god-like perfection of Dhyan Chohanhood 
during their trance, and will be the presiding geniuses of 
the next manwantara, not its helpless subjects. 

Apart altogether, meanwhile, from what may be regard- 
ed as the personal interest of the entities concerned, the 
existence of the failures in Nature at the beginning of 
each manwantara is a fact which contributes in a very 
important degree to a comprehension of the evolutionary 
system. When the planetary chain is first of all evolved 
out of chaos — if we may use such an expression as " first 
of all" in a qualified sense, having regard to the reflec- 
tion that "in the beginning" is a mere fa^on de parler 
applied to any period in eternity — there are no failures 
to deal with. Then the descent of spirit into matter, 
through the elemental, mineral, and other kingdoms, goes 
on in the way already described in earlier chapters of 
this book. But from the second manwantara of a planet- 
ary chain, during the activity of the solar system, which 
provides for many such manwantaras, the course of events 



330 



APPENDIX. 



is somewhat different — easier, if I may again be allowed 
to use an expression that is applicable rather in a con- 
versational than a severely scientific sense. At any rate 
it is quicker, for human entities are already in Existence, 
ready to enter into incarnation as the world, also already 
in existence, can be got ready for them. The truth thus 
appears to be, that after the first manwantara of a series — ■ 
enormously longer in duration than its successors — no 
entities, then first evolved from quite the lower kingdoms, 
do more than attain the threshold of humanity. The late 
failures pass first into incarnation, and then eventually 
the surviving animal entities already differentiated. But, 
compared with the passages in the Esoteric Doctrine 
which affect the current evolution of our own race, these 
considerations, relating to the very early periods of world- 
evolution, have little more than an intellectual interest, 
and cannot as yet by any contributions of mine be very 
greatly amplified. 







%4 









vO 













* 8 M 




v> ^ 









S Xi 



f\ s 



\. V 




. ■ 


*V~' i ^°-<- ', 






^ 


1 

<p 




r " 


J* 





' 




\°°. 







.^^ 



" -_ A L 



6 * ^ 

■i ■?-> 



o Cf 
v > 




* *^A -V 



'/-• 



,Oo, 










^ '" r .\ 






V . s 






& 



^ V L 







% 8 ' A * 










& 







v>V 




;? V» o 



, ^ 




vV 1 V. 



•■ 



- / « 

.... 




^. ^ ; 



°a 



V* 



'^WA r o *</?„ ^ 



